News

DXARTS PhD candidate Stelios Manousakis has received a Special Mention and medal of the Senato della Repubblica Italiana in the Electro-acoustic music category of the International composition competition Città di Udine, for his composition Involuntary Cognition Faction, for voltage-controlled analog electronics (2011/13). The piece was recorded during a residency at the Institue of Sonology's voltage controlled studio in the Hague, the Netherlands. It will be performed during the New Music festival “Contemporanea 2014” in October in Udine (Italy) and included in a CD, together with all other winning works.

Ewa Trębacz's solo CD Polish Music Today: Portraits of Contemporary Polish Composers has been selected as the album of the week by King FM's Second Inversion, their online channel devoted to contemporary music.

Polish Radio, Polish Music Information Center and Polish Composers' Union (ZPK) released Ewa Trębacz's monographic CD as part of the new series Muzyka Polska Dzisiaj (Polish Music Today), promoting new works created by contemporary Polish composers, living and working in Poland and abroad. The CD includes 5 works by Trębacz, created between 2000 and 2013, ranging from solo works with electronics to large orchestral works with ambisonic sound.

Stelios Manousakis, currently a guest artist at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics in Karlsruhe, Germany (Center for Art and Media), will present his work and discuss with ZKM | IMA director Ludger Brümmer and with the public. The focus will be on Hertzian Field #1, a reactive surround sound environment he created during his residency at ZKM.

Stelios's interest in the physical yet invisible radio spaces created by WiFi networks and their interaction with architecture, objects, and our own bodies, led him to discover an obscure surveillance technique and reverse-engineer it for artistic purposes, for performative and installation-based work. The first of a series of pieces to come, Hertzian Field #1 features an innovative system Stelios developed to sense and sonify human bodies within a space, their movement and its patterns, by listening to changes in the flow of ordinary WiFi waves. Multilayered analysis of WiFi interferrence is used to generate a responsive enchanted space, immersing performers and visitors in a hybrid ethereal field of electromagnetic and acoustic waves.

As part of a video series produced by the College of Arts & Sciences, graduate student Robert Twomey describes his piece, Convex Mirror, and reflects on how DXARTS is pushing the frontiers of art with unique combinations of art and science.

Learn more about this project and more of Twomey's work at his website, roberttwomey.com.

DXARTS faculty member James Coupe's Swarm has received an Honorary Mention in the Interactive Art category at Ars Electronica. The installation was selected by a panel including Óscar Abril Ascaso, Irini Papadimitriou, Enrique Rivera, Maholo Uchida and Michel van Dartel, and will be exhibited at the OK Museum of Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria in September.

Charles Dickey (Digital Arts & Experimental Media /Neurobiology) is among the six gonfaloniers selected to represent the College of Arts & Sciences at Commencement, taking place on June 14 at Husky Stadium.

The College selects gonfoloniers from a group of students nominated for their excellence in academics, civic engagement, service, leadership, or any dimension of what it means to be an outstanding member of the university community.

NYC-based artist Andy Deck will lead seminar discussion in Prof Shanken's DX490 Surveillance Culture on Friday, May 23 from 9:30am - 1:20pm. Deck's work Glyphiti (2001) is featured in Shanken's Art and Electronic Media and his work Screening Circle (2006) was commissioned by the Whitney Artport and the Tate Online. Deck will talk about his recent work exploring facial recognition algorithms, particularly with respect to false recognition and false inference. He may also frame issues including drones, satellite imagery, infowar, and privacy/anonymity in the context of prior works, such as Ceci n'est pas un mensonge (a response to Colin Powell's caption-laden satellite photography presented at the U.N.) and Remote Control.

Three days of concert presentations of 3D holographic sound works by Daniel Peterson, Richard Karpen, Joseph Anderson, Juan Pampin and Nicholas Varchausky will take place from May 19-21 at the Semana del Sonido Roberto Fontanarrosa Cultural Center in Rosario, Argentina.Highlighting DXARTS cutting-edge creative work in the research area of Ambisonic holographic sound and spatial sound composition.

DXARTS professor Edward Shanken will speak at the Systems Biology + Systems Art symposium hosted by the Insitute for Systems Biology on April 28 in Seattle. His talk is entitled, “The History and Future of the Lab: Collaborative Research at the Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology." The symposium honors visiting Chinese artist, Xiao Dong Feng.

DXARTS is pleased to welcome Gary Hill as a guest to the Spring 2014 Video Foundations course led by visiting artist Yolande Harris on Thursday, April 24. Participation is limited to DXARTS students due to limited available seating space.

Thursday April 24th
9:30 - 11:20 a.m.
Room 205, Raitt Hall

Gary is an internationally recognized artist often "viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1970s and 1980s." His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity

The University of Washington School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) co-sponsor this concert featuring an evening of improvised experimental music in 3D, with Richard Karpen (piano), Stuart Dempster (trombone), Cuong Vu (trumpet), Ted Poor (drums), Greg Sinibaldi (saxophone), Luke Bergman (bass), Juan Pampin and Joseph Anderson (3D electronics). In this unique concert, the audience will be seated on the stage of Meany Hall surrounded by the musicians and a 3D audio system will be deployed to create a full 3D immersive experience.

Please note that seating will be limited to 300 people for this event and there is no late seating.

DXARTS has been chosen as the inaugural recipient for the College of Arts & Sciences Bergstrom Award.The award will fund the creation of a new "Art & the Brain Lab" to be housed at DXARTS and intended to foster artistic collaborations arising from investigations at the intersection of neuroscience and digital art.

The Bergstrom Award for Art and Science was established for the purpose of supporting projects or activities at the UW that enhance the student experience and bridge the intersection between art and science.

The idea for the DXARTS proposal arose from a successful Fall 2013 DXARTS interdisciplinary seminar course entitled Art and the Brain, which joined art practice (Professor James Coupe), neuroscience (Professor Eberhard Fetz), and the history and theory of art-science collaboration (Professor Edward Shanken).For a more in-depth look at the course, see the Arts & Sciences Perspectives article "This is Your Brain on Art."

The course generated a range of proposals for art-science research projects that students and faculty wished to pursue, but that needed specialized equipment in order to develop further. Examples of possible projects included: musical performances that change according to neural data gathered from their audience, dream-machines that learn neural sleep patterns andattempt to predict and visualize future dreams, and interactive video art installations that are responsive to the unique brain activity of each viewer.

The Art and the Brain Lab will fill a need, demonstrated in the seminar class, to conduct hands-on research at the intersection of art and neuroscience, as well as attract students with natural science backgrounds to collaborate in art-science research.The first phase of development will allow the lab to acquire core equipment enabling faculty and students to build EEG data-driven responsive artworks and environments.These interactive systems will consist of feedback loops between neural activity in users and variations in multimedia output. Changes in specific parameters of a user's brain activity will determine changes in the artwork and, conversely, changes in the artwork may also trigger changes in the user's brain activity.By studying such interactive systems, the lab hopes to facilitate research with the potential for expanding artistic creation, interaction design, human-computer interface development, and neuroscientific knowledge.

DXARTS is the subject of a long article by Seattle Times arts critic Michael Upchurch which appeared in the Sunday, March 23 issue of the Pacific Northwest Magazine. You can follow this link to see the online version of the article.

Closing a 3-month artist residency in Vienna with KulturKontakt Austria and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture, Stelios Manousakis will perform a solo concert at IEM's Open CUBE in Graz. The concert features 3 of his recent feedback-based / cybernetic compositions (part of his research at DXARTS), and will be proceeded by a lecture about his work and some of the context, ideas and techniques behind it.

About
Stelios Manousakis (GR/NL/US) is a composer, performer, sound artist and researcher. He operates across the convergence zones of art, science and engineering - composition, performance and installation - the rich tradition of Western art music and ‘digital folk’ idioms. His work is visceral yet cerebral, communicating through pure, raw experience while being complex and multilayered. His output extends from music compositions – most often with live electronics - to intermedia and sound art installations, to fixed medium pieces and film music. Many of these works merge algorithmic finesse with the expressivity of improvisation, or the immediacy of audience participation. They are often designed as emergent (eco)systems or organisms, unearthing rich and organic worlds through artistic reinventions of models from complexity science, cybernetics, biology and game theory. His work has been shown in various festivals and venues across Europe and the Americas. Besides his solo work, he is a founding member of several music ensembles and multimedia groups. Stelios is in the process of finishing a PhD at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS, University of Washington, Seattle, USA).

Other selected activities during Stelios Manousakis' residency in Austria include:
• Presentation: Guest composer on the weekly radio show Connex, on acoustic and electro-acoustic improvised and related composed music (Orange FM, Vienna, 25.03.2014 - 22h to 23h CET: Livestream)
• Exhibition: 'Act so that there is no use in a center' - KulturKontakt Austria, Artists-in-residence group exhibition (Vienna, 17-27.03.2014)
An abstracted, deconstructed spatial radio play setting 'Tender Buttons: Rooms' by Gertrude Stein, as a distributted, radio transmitted sound installation
• Concert: Palpebla Resonoj #1 - Rhiz, Bloedermittwoch series (Vienna, 19.03.2014)
• Concert: Palpebla Resonoj #1 & Fantasia On A Single Number - Fluc, Klub Moozak series (Vienna, 26.02.2014)
• Workshops: Listening to the world/making the world sound (Vienna & Wels, 02-03.2014)
• Concert: Fantasia On A Single Number - Favoriten Modern series (Vienna, 31.01.2014)
• Lecture: Seminar/Guest artist presentation - Computer Music and Electronic Media department (ELAK), University of Music and Performing Arts (Vienna, 22.01.2014)

The JACK Quartet performs world premieres by UW composers Juan Pampin and Richard Karpen. Highlights include the world premieres of "Respiración Artificial," by Juan Pampin, Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, (DXARTS) and School of Music composition faculty, performed by the JACK Quartet and Mirta Wymerszberg on bandoneon; and “Elliptic,” by School of Music Director Richard Karpen, performed by the JACK Quartet and musicians from the Six Tones—Thanh Thuy and Ngo Tra My from Hanoi, Vietnam, and Stefan Östersjö from Malmo, Sweden.

Respiración Artificial (Artificial Breathing) is a piece for bandoneon, string quartet and electronics written for Mirta Wymerszberg and the JACK Quartet. Rather than treating the bandoneon as a soloist, the piece integrates the instrument with the string quartet, creating a meta instrument whose sound is transformed gradually over the length of the piece. The timing of the piece is provided by the "breathing" of the bandoneon, whose bellows can open over a meter wide and produce extremely powerful sounds. The electronics also play a key role in the piece both as catalyst for the spectral blending process (using my ATS spectral modeling system), as well as spreading sound in the space by means of ultrasonic sound beams. This technology, developed in my DXARTS lab, allows the formation of highly focalized beams of sound that can be dynamically moved around the space by electronic means. This will be the first time this technology is used in a concert.

I have worked with the Six Tones (the Vietnamese master musicians Ngo Tra My and Nguyen Thanh Thuy and Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö) on a few large-scale pieces including Idioms (a theater work for the trio with the addition of three actors, and live electronics) and more recently Seven Stories (a feature-length dance film). I have also worked previously with the JACK Quartet to create Aperture II, a work for string quartet and live electronics. As in my previous works with the Six Tones, the music that the musicians play in Elliptic was created through a deeply and mutually enriching collaborative process that we have developed together over the years. A similar approach marks my collaboration with the JACK Quartet.

Note: Richard Karpen and the Six Tones have also collaborated to create Nam Maí, a new work that will be premiered in March 21, 2014 by Seattle Symphony (conducted by School of Music alumna Julia Tai) on its Celebrate Asia series.

JACK has led workshops with young performers and composers at Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, New York University, Columbia University, the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, June in Buffalo, New Music on the Point, and at the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. In addition to working with composers and performers, JACK seeks to broaden and diversify the potential audience for new music through educational presentations designed for a variety of ages, backgrounds, and levels of musical experience.

The members of the quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music and studied closely with the Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

The Six Tones

The Vietnamese language is a tonal language. It uses six tones, or intonations, which may give the same utterance a different meaning. The composition 'The Six Tones' is the fruit of a close collaboration between Henrik Frisk, Stefan Östersjö, Than y and Ngo Tra My which took its beginning in April 2006. The intention was to the optimal conditions for an open meeting between different cultures on equal terms. At the outset we attempted to get beyond a collage-like superimposition of typical elements from the two cultures, but rather to strive for a more experimental sound. A series of collective improvisations based on some material originally put forward for the guitar and electronics piece 'Repetition Repeats all other Repetitions' written for Stefan Östersjö, formed the basis for the composition. After many s and negotiations and further improvisations the piece found its final form at the first performance in Hanoi in October 2006. The four string instruments, dan tranh (a traditional Vietnamese zither), dan bau (a single string, electrically amplified Vietnamese traditional instrument, banjo (plucked as well as played with e-bow) and 10-stringed guitar are electronically manipulated in the computer part, which also contains some prepared material.

Richard Karpen is a composer and researcher in multiple areas music and the arts. His compositions for both electronic media and live performance are widely known, recorded, and performed internationally. Over the last 30 years he has also been one of the leading pioneers in the development of computer applications for music composition, interactive performance, and sonic arts. He has recently returned to the stage as a pianist.

Karpen is currently Director of the School of Music at the University of Washington where he is also a Professor of Music Composition. He previously served at the UW as Divisional Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). He has been the recipient of many awards, grants, and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Fellowships and grants for work outside of the United States include a Fulbright to Italy, a residency at IRCAM in France, and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the United Kingdom. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Karpen is a native of New York, where he studied composition with Charles Dodge and Gheorghe Costinescu.

Karpen has composed works for many leading international soloists such as soprano Judith Bettina, violist Garth Knox, trombonist Stuart Dempster, flutists Laura Chislett and Jos Zwaanenberg, guitarist Stefan Ostersjo, and oboist Alex Klein. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Karpen's compositions have been recorded on a variety of labels including Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, Le Chant du Monde, DIFFUSION i MeDIA, Fleur du Son, and Capstone.

Juan Pampin, live electronics

Juan Pampin is Associate Professor of Music Composition at University of Washington and founding faculty member of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), for which he currently serves as Director. He received an MA in Composition from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon, France and a DMA in Composition from Stanford University, where he studied with composer Jonathan Harvey. Juan Pampin’s music explores the concepts of memory and materiality through the use of algorithmic and signal processing tools of his own development. His compositions, including pieces for instrumental, digital, and mixed media, and have been performed around the world by world-class soloists and ensembles such as Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the JACK Quartet, Sinfonia 21, Susana Kasakoff and Melia Watras. A recording of his piece On Space, for six percussionists and 3D electronic sounds, has been recently released as part of the Les Percussions de Strasbourg 50th Anniversary Edition CD box published by Universal Music France.

Mirta Wymerszberg, bandoneon

An accomplished flutist, bandoneon player and vocalist, Seattle musician Mirta Wymerszberg, a native of Buenos Aires, brings extensive experience in authentic tango music from Argentina, where she received her musical education and performed classical and tango music. She earned a bachelor's degree in flute performance at the Conservatory of Buenos Aires, as well as a degree in baroque flute performance and chamber music in Lyon, France. She moved to California in 1995, where she co-founded, performed and recorded with tango duo Flor de Tango and continued to develop her career in baroque music with faculty of the Music Department at Stanford University. After obtaining a Master of Arts degree in flute performance at UC Santa Cruz she moved to Seattle, WA, where she founded tango band La Luciérnaga. She studied bandoneon with Victor Hugo Villena and Rodolfo Daluisio. Mirta has been involved in several recording projects with tango musicians in Buenos Aires, and recently participated in the CD recording of Figuración de Gabino Betinotti, by composer Pablo Di Liscia and poet Oscar Steimberg, with tango singer Brian Chambouleyron.

Artist and Timothy Weaver will visit DXARTS to lead a graduate seminar and meet with DXARTS students on Friday, March 14.

Dr Timothy Weaver is Associate Professor and DIrector of the Emergent Digital Practices program at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA. He is a new media artist and former life scientist whose concerted objective has been to contribute to the restoration of ecological memory through a process of speculative inquiry along the art | technology interface. Dr Weaver's creative research areas include emerging forms of narrativity, biomimetics, shared interactive space and sustainable design.

In the part 15 years, Weaver's works have intersected at diverse range of junctures with respect to sociocultural/ecological contexts and their associated dialectics including: the environmental changes in the Andes and Upper Amazon Basin; normalization of life for Ixil Mayan refugees returning to their post-genocidal homelands; the diffusion between the clinical and familial at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Research Center and the propagation of ecological memory in the digital/electronic media domain. Project activities are also available at: lab.biotica.org and www.primamateria.org.

Dr Weaver will be leading the DX500 Experimental Research Seminar at 10:30-12:20 in 221 Raitt Hall, which is open to all affliated with the program. He will then be conducting studio visits with DXARTS doctoral students at the Fremont Fab Lab.

Dr Weaver will also be performing at IETI on Saturday March 22nd 2014. For more information on this perfromance please refer to

SENSE | SIGNAL is an exhibition developed through discussions and experiments in the Art and the Environment seminar led by Visiting Artist Yolande Harris at DXARTS this quarter. The exhibition includes installations, walks and performances by Robert Blatt, Nancy Chan, Martin Jarmick, Coley Mixan, Joel Ong and Marcin Paczkowski. Events will occur throughout the evening, and refreshments will be provided.

His current projects include the sonification of deterministic chaotic systems, research into the bio-acoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, research on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environments, design of inexpensive wave-guides and transducer systems for environmental sound monitoring, and the design of self-organizing autonomous sound systems for spawning interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems.

After leading DXARTS 490 Art and the Environment Seminar at 10:30-12:30 in 205 Raitt Hall, David will meet individually with seminar students and DXARTS doctoral students.

Artist Victoria Vesna will be visiting DXARTS on Friday, Feb 21. Dr. Vesna is Professor of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. She is also Director of Research at the new Art, Media, and Technology program at Parsons New School for Art and Design and recently served as senior researcher at IMéRA (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, 2011-2013). She was one of the first students to earn a Ph.D. from the Planetary Collegium (then known as CAiiA+STAR), founded by Roy Ascott.

Vesna's work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. She has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, including representing Yugoslavia at the Venice Bienale in 1986 and more than seventy group shows. She has published over twenty papers and given 100+ invited talks in the last decade. Vesna is editor of the volume, Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, U Minnesota Press, 2007) and more recently Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy (Intellect Press, 2011), which includes an essay co-authored by DXARTS faculty member Edward Shanken and Duke art historian Kristine Stiles.

Vesna is a serial collaborator. She forms partnerships with scientists to research subjects such as nanoscale science, which she then interprets in interactive video installations and other artwork. Her collaborators have included nanoscientist Dr. Jim Gimzewski and neuroscientist Dr. Siddharth Ramakrishnan.

Dr. Vesna will lead DX500 Experimental Research Seminar at 10:30-12:20 in 221 Raitt Hall, which is open to all affiliated with the program. She will then meet individually with DXARTS doctoral students at the Fremont Fab Lab.

On February 25, Swiss composer and conductor André Richard will perform at 7:30 p.m. in Meany Theater as part of the Music of Today Series. Richard worked closely with Luigi Nono, one of the most notable composers of the 20th Century. A world-wide authority on the composer and his music, Richard concludes a week-long residency at the School of Music at this concert featuring works by Nono and others.

The UW School of Music and DXARTS co-curate the Music of Today Series, featuring groundbreaking new works and modern classics performed by renowned visiting artists.

ARTIST BIO

André Richard is a composer, conductor and performer of live electronic music. He studied at Geneva Conservatory and with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough at Freiburg Musikhochschule. He then did advanced study in electronic music with Hans Peter Haller at EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR in Freiburg and at IRCAM in Paris.

His works have been performed inter alia at the international music festivals in Budapest, Frankfurt, Oslo and Essen. He has taught at Geneva Conservatory and Freiburg Musikhochschule and has been the longstanding managing director of the Freiburg Institute for New Music.

Besides his many international concert engagements and prizes, he has served as artistic director of the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of SWR (1989–2005). Working closely with composers, performers and the Studio’s staff, he has been internationally active as a sound director or conductor, producing many major new works with integrated live electronic resources. Since the beginning of 2006 he has carried on his activities on a freelance basis.

He has won the Reinhold Schneider Prize (the cultural prize of the city of Freiburg, 1990), the Prize of the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Foundation (Munich, 1994) and the European Cultural Prize for New Music (1998).

Chancellor Debra Friedman died on January 26, 2014 of lung cancer. She brought into sharp focus an identity for UW Tacoma as an urban-serving campus, building on the substantial investment the region has always made in its university. That identity and investment is rooted in her unyielding passion: the transformational impact of education — that changes the lives of individuals and the communities of which they are a part. In those two-and-a-half years, she became a key leader in the South Sound region.

DXARTS is deeply saddened by the recent news of UW Tacoma Chancellor Debra Friedman's passing. Among the countless positive impacts she made at the University of Washington over the years, one contribution in particular speaks directly to our own history. To put it quite simply, DXARTS wouldn't exist if it weren't for Debra Friedman.

In 1999, she inspired and supported an application for a UW $500,000 Tools of Transformation grant, which enabled CARTAH (Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities, the precursor to DXARTS) to expand, adding critical faculty and equipment. Later, in 2001, she again played a key role in the center's growth, this time with her guidance and support for our successful bid for the University Initiatives Fund grant, which created DXARTS.

We are extremely grateful to Chancellor Friedman and impact she has had here and across the University of Washington. She will be dearly missed.

Friedman’s passion was the impact of education on individuals and entire communities. She focused on expanding UW Tacoma’s reach into the community, partnering with local schools as well as Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Full coverage and updates can be found on the UW Chancellor webpage.

Resuming Parmigianino’s project of self-portraiture in the age of intelligent machines, this project uses a CNC plotter, 180º circular fisheye lens, and custom software to record a layered image of place. Substituting computer vision and precision automation for the human eye and hand, this project operates at a physical precision and temporal duration beyond what is humanly possible. This site-specific installation produces a series of 12 drawings over a period of three months. Learn more about the project at http://www.roberttwomey.com/convex-mirror/.

About the project, Twomey says:

My early experience as an engineer and neuroimaging researcher has given me intimate knowledge of technical and scientific practice. This is a key element of my artistic endeavor. I approach creative work with the critical perspective of an artist—interested in particular technologies’ impact on our evolving culture, and how technologies can be use create new forms of expression, communication, and meaning. I am addressing the questions of who we are and how we see ourselves through work integrating traditional and new forms of expression. My projects are technically innovative while critically engaged with material and cultural tradition.

Continuing a series of projects exploring how memory is constructed, contained, and altered in space, Rice’s video installation organizes a network of cameras, screens, and lighting elements throughout Suyama Space. The cameras, each animated by a unique mechanical device, open up different ways of moving through and seeing spaces, surfaces, and frames created by the gallery’s architecture.

Further exploring the building, cameras look beyond the main floor to the less visible work spaces and storage areas below, drawing together videos of the gallery with scenes of the tools, materials, and models used by the architecture studio. The installation works as a mechanism for both creating and viewing images, and thus emulates the functions of Suyama Space: a studio and a gallery, a site of production and presentation.

DXARTS Ph.D. Candidate Robert Twomey's work, Convex Mirror, will be on display in a storefront window on Boren and Harris through February 14th as part of the Storefronts Seattle program. Twomey's piece will be included in the Storefronts Seattle Art Walk on Friday, January 17. See below for more details and the event page.

Resuming Parmigianino’s project of self-portraiture in the age of intelligent machines, this project uses a CNC plotter, 180º circular fisheye lens, and custom software to record a layered image of place. Substituting computer vision and precision automation for the human eye and hand, this project operates at a physical precision and temporal duration beyond what is humanly possible. This site-specific installation produces a series of 12 drawings over a period of three months. Learn more about the project at http://www.roberttwomey.com/convex-mirror/

Dr. Edward Shanken, Visiting Associate Professor at DXARTS presents new thoughts on art, culture, and social media at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, Jan 15, 2014. He will be one of three featured speakers, along with Dr. Jonathan Crary, Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University and Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator at the Whitney. The symposium is organized by Christiane Paul and Gordon Hall. http://whitney.org/Events/SharedSpaces.

In preparation for the talk, Shanken used Facebook as a forum to generate responses to the provocations posed by the symposium organizers. These responses serve as source material for his presentation. He has posted his talk as a .pptx file here: http://tiny.cc/Bringing_To_Bringing_Out

DXARTS is pleased to announce that applications for our PhD program are now being accepted. The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle, offers a unique practice-based Ph.D. program.

DXARTS encourages applications from all interdisciplinary fields of experimental arts practice, with financial packages including a generous stipend and full tuition waiver.

DXARTS graduate student Ha Na Lee is among the winners of this year's Vilcek Foundation's dARTboard prize. The highly competitive award is given to only a select few entrants. The winning entries - including Ms. Lee's Vestiges, Part II are explored here at dARTboard, a digital art space developed to share the creativity and accomplishments of foreign-born artists working in this emerging field.

An excerpt from the Vilcek Foundation website, vilcek.org:

For the first time since the dARTboard launched in 2012, the Vilcek Foundation is proud to present an exhibition of not one but three foreign-born digital artists: Canadian-born Nicholas Hanna, South Korean-born Ha Na Lee and Salvadoran-born Fernando Orellana. Each was selected from an extremely competitive pool of applicants who submitted work during the dARTboard Call for Entries in Digital Art this past fall. The foundation has also tripled the prize to $15,000, which will be divided evenly between the chosen artists.

Dr. Edward Shanken, Visiting Associate Professor at DXARTS, presents "Alternative Nows and Thens to Be: Art History and the Future of Art," on December 19 as a keynote speaker in the II Symposium at the MADATAC 05 Festival of New Media Arts in Madrid, Spain. The symposium will reflect on the interplay between art, science, technology and the creative processes connected to urban life and contemporary media.

Dr. Shanken outlines the themes explored in his talk:

The malleability of history is demonstrated by the many ways the canon of art history has been written and rewritten from the perspectives of ever-changing presents. But this is also a two way street. Just as every “now” arguably constructs an alternative “then,” so every “then” constructs an alternative “now.” Moreover, every alternative “now” and “then” establishes a particular foundation for imagining the future. This inevitably impacts the “nows” and “thens” to be; those that are yet to come. My talk will explore the relationship between the past, present, and future with respect to writing and rewriting art historical narratives. I will share some examples from my own work to rewrite the history of art, including attempts to expand the field of discourse and to bridge the gap between mainstream contemporary art and new media art.

MADATAC is an annual Contemporary Festival of New Media Arts & Advanced Audio Visual Technologies. It is an independent, non-profit, international platform with an open, all-encompassing philosophy and an on-going commitment to education and free access. View the official video trailer from the 2013 festival MADATAC 05 here:

DXARTS Visiting Artist Yolande Harris's interactive installation "Pink Noise" will be exhibited at the MADATAC 05 Festival of New Media Arts in Madrid, Spain, from December 18 - 22. The installation uses sound recorded underwater at a National Marine Reserve in mid summer, juxtaposed with a video projection of light through layers of water from the same location.

Artist Scott Kildall will deliver a guest lecture entitled "Performing the Imaginary" on Tuesday, December 3, to a DXARTS class. The talk is also free and open to the public.

Scott creates algorithms, sculptures, performances and videos which repurpose networks of communication and production. Perhaps best known for his Second Life performances with the collective "Second Front," the Wikipedia Art project, and Tweets in Space, his work frequently explores themes of future-thinking and translation between the virtual and the real. Based in San Francisco, Kildall recently was New Media Developer at the Exploratorium and will be artist in residence at Instructables. Learn more about Scott and his work at his website: http://www.kildall.com/index.html

MUSIC OF TODAY
DXARTS: An Evening of Electro-Acoustic Music
Thursday, November 14, 2013 7:30pm
Meany Theater

The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) presents a concert of electro-acoustic music presenting rarely heard early works along with contemporary developments in the genre, performed via a multi-channel sound system.

This concert features early works by early 20th century avant-garde artist Walter Ruttmann and musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer alongside contemporary compositions by Matthew Barnard and Pete Stollery. Innovative examples from newly appointed DXARTS staff member Joseph Anderson and the Director of the School of Music, Richard Karpen, complete the program. Presented by the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) and the University of Washington, Seattle, this concert will be performed over DXARTS' 3D sound diffusion system.

The University of Washington School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) co-sponsor this series featuring groundbreaking new works and modern classics by faculty and guest composers.

Walter Ruttmann was born in 1887 in Frankfurt and died in 1941 in Berlin. He studied architecture and painting and worked as a graphic designer. His film career began in the early 1920s. His first abstract short films, "Opus I" (1921) and "Opus II" (1923) were experiments with new forms of film expression.

Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new form techniques. Together with Erwin Piscator, he worked on the experimental film "Melodie der Welt" (1929).

Richard Karpen is a composer and researcher in multiple areas music and the arts. His compositions for both electronic media and live performance are widely known, recorded, and performed internationally. Over the last 30 years he has also been one of the leading pioneers in the development of computer applications for music composition, interactive performance, and sonic arts. He has recently returned to the stage as a pianist.

Karpen is currently Director of the School of Music at the University of Washington where he is also a Professor of Music Composition. He previously served at the UW as Divisional Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). He has been the recipient of many awards, grants, and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Fellowships and grants for work outside of the United States include a Fulbright to Italy, a residency at IRCAM in France, and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the United Kingdom. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Karpen is a native of New York, where he studied composition with Charles Dodge and Gheorghe Costinescu.

Karpen has composed works for many leading international soloists such as soprano Judith Bettina, violist Garth Knox, trombonist Stuart Dempster, flutists Laura Chislett and Jos Zwaanenberg, guitarist Stefan Ostersjo, and oboist Alex Klein. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Karpen's compositions have been recorded on a variety of labels including Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, Le Chant du Monde, DIFFUSION i MeDIA, Fleur du Son, and Capstone.

Pete Stollery

Pete Stollery studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, where he was one of the first members of BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) in the early ’80s. He now composes almost exclusively in the electroacoustic medium, particularly acousmatic music.

He has collaborated with practitioners from other artistic disciplines, particularly dance and sculpture and has produced music and sound design for a number of UK visitor attractions including Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, Magna in Rotherham and St Patrick’s World in Downpatrick (Northern Ireland).

He is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music and Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), delivering courses on the creative applications of technology in music and music education to students, schoolchildren and the general public.

He was a board member of Sonic Arts Network (SAN), the national organization promoting electroacoustic music in the UK, which he chaired in 1996-99 and again in 2002-03. In 1996, along with Alistair MacDonald, Robert Dow andSimon Atkinson, he established invisiblEARts (www.invisiblearts.org.uk) whose aim is to perform acousmatic music throughout Scotland and to promote Scottish acousmatic music to a wider audience, both within Scotland and abroad.

Pierre Schaeffer

The father of musique concrète, French composer Pierre Schaeffer was among the most visionary artists of the postwar era; through the creation of abstract sound mosaics divorced from conventional musical theory, he pioneered a sonic revolution which continues to resonate across the contemporary cultural landscape, most deeply in the grooves of hip-hop and electronica.

Born in 1910, Schaeffer was not a trained musician or composer, but was instead working as a radio engineer when he founded the RTF electronic studio in 1944 to begin his first experiments in what would ultimately be dubbed "musique concrète." Working with found fragments of sound -- both musical and environmental in origin -- he assembled his first tape-machine pieces, collages of noise manipulated through changes in pitch, duration and amplitude; the end result heralded a radical new interpretation of musical form and perception.

In October 1948, Schaeffer broadcast his first public piece, Etude aux Chemins de Fer, over French radio airwaves; although the public reaction ranged from comic disbelief to genuine outrage, many composers and performers were intrigued, among them Pierre Henry, who in 1949 joined the RTF staff, as well as future collaborators Luc Ferrari and Iannis Xenakis. (Olivier Messiaen was also a guest, bringing with him students Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.)Schaeffer forged on, in 1948 completing Etude Pathetique, which in its frenetic mix of sampled voices anticipated the emergence of hip-hop scratching techniques by over a generation; by 1949's Suite pour 14 Instruments, he had turned to neo-classical textures, distorted virtually beyond recognition. In 1950,Schaeffer and Henry collaborated on Symphonie pour un homme seul, a 12-movement work employing the sounds of the human body.

Working with the classically-trained Henry on subsequent pieces including Variations Sur une Flute Mexicaine and Orphee 51 clearly informed Schaeffer'slater projects, as he soon adopted a more accessible musical approach. Together, the two men also co-founded the Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1951; later rechristened the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, or GRM, their studio became the launching pad behind some of the most crucial electronic music compositions of the era, among them Edgard Varèse's Deserts. However, by the end of the decade most of the GRM's members grew increasingly disenchanted with the painstaking efforts required to construct pieces from vinyl records and magnetic tape; after later, tightly-constructed works like 1958's Etude aux Sons Animes and the next year's Etudes aux Objets, even Schaeffer himself announced his retirement from music in 1960.

Leaving the GRM in the hands of Francois Bayle, some months later Schaefferfounded the research center of the Office of French Television Broadcasting, serving as its director from 1960 to 1975; in 1967, he also published an essay titled "Musique Concrète: What Do I Know?" which largely dismissed the principles behind his groundbreaking work, concluding that what music now needed was "searchers," not "auteurs." In later years, Schaeffer did explore areas of psycho-acoustic research which he dubbed Traite de Objets Musicaux (TOM); these experiments yielded one final piece, the 11-minute Le Triedre Fertile. He also hit the lecture circuit and agreed to produce radio presentations.Pierre Schaeffer died in Aix-en-Provence on August 19, 1995.

Matthew Barnard

Based in the UK, Matthew Barnard is a composer and researcher investigating the compositional avenues of the binaural method of recording and reproduction. He completed a PhD in Composition at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus under the supervision of Dr Joseph Anderson.

Teaching and research interests include electroacoustic (acousmatic) composition, popular electronic music composition and production, radio art and production, acoustic ecology and field recording, sound design, recording techniques and mixing and mastering praxis.He is currently a lecturer in music technology at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus.

Joseph Anderson

Joseph Anderson is a composer with a particular interest in the development of a spatio-musical practice of sound composition and performance. This work is focused on acousmatic music created through self-authored tools and signal processing algorithms. He is the lead author of the Ambisonic Toolkit which brings many of these advanced spatial techniques to a wider audience of artists and composers.

As a former member of the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) Anderson set up the San Francisco Tape Music Collective (SFTMC) with Matt Ingalls to bring the practice of sound diffusion to public performances in the San Francisco Bay Area. And, through the SFTMC Anderson continues to programme and perform on the The San Francisco Tape Music Festival. Recognitions for his compositional efforts have included the “Grand Prix” from the 1997 Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition for Change’s Music.

Having been employed in a wide variety of contexts, Anderson has experience in both industry and academia, working as a DSP engineer in Silicon Valley at Analog Devices and more recently as a Lecturer at the University of Hull. Anderson has studied Computer Music with Russell Pinkston at the University of Texas, and completed his postgraduate work (MMus, PhD) with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham.

The idea of artistic research is a hot topic today, especially in our moment of the information economy and intellectual speculation. The problem is that the word research is bound to specific scientific and reductionist connotations that are connected to its specific methodologies which are at odds with the way art is made. In the lecture entitled “Trans-thinking: Artistic Research in the 21st Century” Neidich will use five examples of his own performative art production created in the four past years to elucidate a thick understanding of the power of the Artistic Method.

Initiated by engineering research in robotic camera behavior, SwarmVision is an artistic installation that engages the viewer to consider current directions in machine learning as they relate to aesthetics in machine vision. Viewers watching the cameras behave become aware that the camera robots analyze the scene. Further, during moments when the robot cameras appeared to be looking at each other, viewers experience a sense of non-verbal communication between the autonomous agents. The lecture will give an overview of the project and introduce art historical references such as the Bauhaus painter/photographer Moholy-Nagy’s research in image-time-space-movement, and an early machine vision work by the Canadian artist Michael Snow titled “La Region Centrale." This talk will also discuss two other multimedia works by Legrady, Voice of Sisyphus and Refraction.

DXARTS visiting associate professor Edward Shanken is one of the keynote speakers for the 2013 Re-New Digital Arts Festival, taking place in Copenhagen from October 28 to November 3.

The annual Re-New con-fest is a meeting-point for all those active in the art- science-technology amalgam. The event is a platform for artists, technologists, curators, researchers and scientists alike, and facilitates networking, knowledge sharing and dissemination.

Void is a “semi-theatre piece” that explores the essence of life. The multi-media, designed by the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental media, DXARTS, is filled with Zen aesthetics and interactive lighting designs, creating an in-depth dialogue among the orient, the west and contemporary arts.

Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science, and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and has been translated into six languages. Professor Shanken's recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and software, art historiography, land art, investigatory art, sound art and ecology, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art.

Starting in Fall 2013, Dr. Shanken joins the DXARTS faculty as Visiting Associate Professor. This quarter, Professor Shanken will be teaching DXARTS 200 (Digital Art and New Media: History, Theory, and Practice), based on his own book "Art and Electronic Media" (Phaidon), as well as an interdisciplinary graduate course "Art and the brain" (DXARTS 490), in collaboration with Professor James Coupe (DXARTS), and Professor Eberhard E. Fetz (Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Core Staff, Regional Primate Research Center; Adjunct, Department of Bioengineering).

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the intersections between art and neuroscience. Led by faculty from DXARTS and the Neurobiology & Behavior Program, a range of topics will be explored, including computational systems, electronic media, data visualization, consciousness, artificial intelligence, perception and creativity. The course will include lectures, paper review, student presentations and discussion. Students will select areas of focus and develop individual or collaborative research projects that intersect both fields. Readings may be drawn from the sample bibliography included at the course website, but will vary in response to the specific interests of seminar participants.

Undergraduates (junior/senior), and graduate students with backgrounds in neurobiology, art/art history, CHID, computer science, and engineering are encouraged to register. Please contact Prof. JAMES COUPE for add codes.

DXARTS faculty member James Coupe has work being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, Canada from September 4 - December 29, 2013

Swarm is an installation that identifies people in the museum according to their demographic and segments them into 'clans' in competing versions of the gallery space.

From Coupe's website:

Exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art,
Toronto, Canada
September 4 - December 29, 2013

Stereo cameras, monitors, computers

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival
Presented in partnership with MOCCA
Co-curated by Noah Cowan, Artistic Director, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and David Liss, Artistic Director/Curator, MOCCA.
Created with support from Creative Capital.

In his films, David Cronenberg explores the evolution of new social personalities or types, often the result of technological advancements that lead to mutations, fusions between the human and the non-human, and new understandings of the “social” and the “biological.” For instance, in Scanners and Stereo, humans have developed telekinetic powers; in Crimes of the Future, a dermatological disease has killed all sexually mature women; inVideoDrome humans have developed malignant tumors from television signals; in ExistenZ, immersion in video games prompts an ontological collapse of the virtual and the real; and in his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novelCrash, characters develop erotic fascinations with car crashes.

This project takes inspiration from another Ballard novel, High-Rise (1975), a text that features many of Cronenberg’s common themes, and is also reminiscent of Cronenberg’s apartment block-set films like Shivers andCrimes of the Future. In High-Rise, Ballard envisions a new social type that results from living in close proximity in a modern, thousand-resident apartment building. Initially, the residents experience insomnia, and gradually become territorial about shared spaces such as elevators, parking spaces, swimming pools, roof gardens, grocery stores, etc. Eventually, the pressures of isolated yet claustrophobic living causes the residents of the high-rise to form clans, which are organized around class demographics—with the wealthy residing on the top floors, and the working classes on the ground floor. The situation rapidly becomes monstrous, as residents begin killing and raping each other in order to assert control of their environments.

For Ballard, the residents are cool, unemotional, desensitized, with minimal need for privacy and capable of thriving within the closed environment of this “malevolent zoo”:

[The residents had] no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late-twentieth century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

Ballard’s description of the paradoxical conditions of isolation and proximity in the High-Rise is analogous to the effects of twenty-first-century Social Media. Virtual environments like Facebook have successfully colonized our social existences, in part because of their efficiency and viral expansion into our daily lives. Users are willing to offer up their privacy to social media systems because they simplify the individual management of our social lives. In return, we are confronted with systems that take control over who we know, what we know about them and how those relationships are framed, remembered, and proceed. As a result, it is not only our bodies that are being reshaped by modern technology, but also our minds; social media technologies involve a redistribution of identities based upon principles of demographic segmentation, social exclusivity, and the illusion of community. Just as in High-Rise, the collision of individual and masses involves a psycho-pathological breakdown, re-mapped by technology.

This installation re-presents the gallery as if it were exclusively occupied by specific demographics of people. As people move through the gallery, their image is profiled, archived, appropriated and inserted into a specific ‘clan’. As they look at the different rows of monitors, they will see these different clans occupying the museum, proliferating in number, assembling and dispersing: a community that appears to be waiting for something to happen, and one that seems intimately familiar.

Each row of monitors shows a panorama of the gallery but occupied by a different group of people – one might be women in their fifties, one might be people of Asian descent, one might be men in their forties, one might be people all dressed in black. The clans are a mixture of live and recorded footage – so a male viewer may find himself appearing to be joined in the museum by a group of men in their forties, with a short vignette of himself, apparently alongside a group of other men, some of whom he has noticed as he walked through the gallery, but most of whom are nowhere to be seen in the actual museum. For subsequent viewers of the same demographic, this viewer may become part of that group.

There is menace inherent in the occupation of a specific space by a single demographic, even more so when that space is a privileged site such as a museum. There is further tension to be found in the parallel occupation of that space by different groupings – some clans are large, some small, all suggesting an impending confrontation. As new people enter the gallery, visitors past and present size them up, waiting to see which clan they will join, and adding to the blend of tension and exclusivity, threat and solidarity pervading the museum.

With thanks to DXARTS, Yi Ding, James Hughes, Tivon Rice and John Robinson

Hector Bravo Benard presented his new work for extended classical guitar and live electronics at a concert in the Espace Senghor, in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the Fifth Kyma International Sound Symposium (Sep 13-15). He also gave a workshop at the Institut Supérieur Industriel de Bruxelles introducing some of the ideas and techniques used in the piece.

On August 30th, 2013, at Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Nicolás Varchausky will be presenting new pieces from the series Photo-Sensitive Volumes, composed for instruments that turn light into sound. Mechanical photo-sensitive turntables, sonic backlights and bars of light will be expanded through live electronics to create an immersive sonic experience. The first Photo-Sensitive Volumes were premiered in 2011 as part of the piece LA BIBLIOTECA CIEGA, which has just received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica 2013 in the Digital Musics & Sound Art Category. This time, Varchausky will be joined by Javier Cabanellas from Banda Sinfónica de Ciegos, to perform Volumes IV, V and III bis.

TheHorizon is an Imaginary Line is an art installation that utilizes experimental light and electroacoustic compositions to transform the poetic experience of the Jones Playhouse Theatre space.

It is exhibited at the Jones Playhouse Theatre on Monday, July 8 from 4pm until 10pm. Each piece runs for 20 minutes and will be open for up to 6 people at a time. Please RSVP to reserve your spot by clicking at this link.

An article appearing in the May 2013 issue of the College of Arts & Sciences' Perspectives magazine explores the technology and creative process behind the scenes of Sanctum, a recent installation at the Henry Art Gallery created by DXARTS faculty Juan Pampin and James Coupe.

"Developing this has been a huge research project," Pampin said. "A piece like this couldn't be done without a place like DXARTS. It's not something that could be produced by one artist in a studio."

The new netlabel of experimental music, Inkilino Records, is proud to announce the first release of its catalog: Speaker Performing Kiosk Live Sessions Vol. 1 by argentine composer Nicolás Varchausky. This sizzling live album collects compelling performances produced with a custom made device that generates sound out of feedback between speakers and microphones hovered around by the performer. It is part of Inkilino Records feedback series, dedicated to music based on recursive and feedback processes.

ABOUT THE ALBUM

This album gathers 9 live excerpts from concerts in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Huddersfield and Seattle given with the Speaker Performing Kiosk: an autarchic performing device designed and performed by Varchausky. All sounds were generated live creating feedback between speakers and microphones manipulated by the performer, and processed by a computer in real time. While inside the device, Varchausky creates fields of resonance and shifting currents of air pressure in the space using his body as an antenna to explore the space in search of its interference patterns. The featured recordings were made between 2006 and 2011 in a wide range of sites, such as an old chapel, a pub, a museum space and the reading room of Argentina’s former National Library. No pre-recorded sounds or sensors of any kind were used. No additional editing or overdubs were made.

This release and the upcoming physical edition were made possible with the generous support from DXARTS (The Center for the Digital Arts and Experimental Media), Proyecto I+D S.A.E.T.A.S. (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes), Universidad Tres de Febrero and Archivo P.A.I.S.

ABOUT THE PERFOMERCIAL

For the release party and celebrating the launching of this new netlabel, Varchausky created Inkilino Records® Perfomercial: a direct response performance in collaboration with artist and performer Zoe Di Rienzo. Presented as part of ArteBA (Buenos Aires Art Fair) at BSM Art Building, this Perfomercial became a platform for social interactions, audiovisual experiences and economic transactions. A Limited Edition USB Drive featuring a full length performance was offered with the first 30 pre-orders of the physical De Luxe Limited Edition CD.

ABOUT THE AUTARCHIC DEVICE

Speaker Performing Kiosk is a self-contained sonic node that develops the idea of the speaker not as an object that reproduces sound but as an object that generates it, creating an electronic instrument that uses analog feedback as its main material and the human body as a unit of transformation. Holding two wireless microphones in his hands, the performer transforms the emerging sound in real time both acoustically – by moving through the space and physically exploring its interference patterns – and digitally – by means of a computer software. This “stand-alone” device consists of an aluminum cubic structure of 8 feet per side that can hold its own light and sound systems. The speakers and the microphones become the actual sound sources, while the room, the computer and the actions of the performer modulate them, unbalancing the sound flux into a feedback choir.

ABOUT INKILINO RECORDS

Inkilino Records [bits for free | atoms for sale] offers experimental electronic music made by artists working on the intersection of music composition, performance and sound art, and combining the development of their own instruments (virtual and physical) with artistic research. Coming soon is the digital feedback suite Primeval Sonic Atoms by Greek artist Stelios Manousakis. Other works and series are under development, such as a sound art and a non real time series. Among other artists that will release material through Inkilino Records are Hugo Solís (MX), TeZ (IT) y Juan Pampín (AR).

Sanctum is a public art work that uses the persistent flow of people around the Henry Art Gallery as input, extracting narratives from the demographics of passers-by and the patterns of their movement. The flow of people is used as a physical analogue to another type of crowd, the virtual inhabitants of social networks such as Facebook.

As a person approaches the gallery, they are tracked, analyzed and recorded by video cameras programmed to identify people according to their age and gender. They hear a cacophony of voices, all telling stories. As they get closer to the gallery, the voices become clearer, gradually becoming a single voice that matches their age and gender, and telling a story composed from demographically-appropriate Facebook status updates. A grid of 18 large video monitors on the façade of the gallery picks their face out of the crowd, automatically integrating footage of them with a variety of live and pre-recorded footage from around the gallery façade.

The installation aims to create a locus of complex and intense social networking activity, reaching out of the gallery to embed the passer by. As unexpected flâneurs, people passing by the Henry are assaulted by a multitude of voices, videos and text, of which, as they approach the façade, they will eventually become the focal point.

Join the Sanctum Facebook application [here]. By joining, your Facebook status updates will become content for Sanctum's narrative system. All posts that you make to Facebook will remain anonymous - they will be tagged with age and gender, but no other personal data will be used. If you visit Sanctum at the Henry Art Gallery, you can potentially see your status updates used as parts of the stories that are generated.

In 1955, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was appointed Director of the National Library at the same time he was losing his sight completely. In his “Poem of the Gifts”, he reflects on the magnificent irony of being given at once “the books and the night”. Nicolás Varchausky´s La Biblioteca Ciega (the Blind Library) is a site-specific sound art performance composed for the very reading room of the library where Borges stood sightless surrounded by books.

The piece uses a series of custom made instruments that turn light into sound. Mechatronic optical turntables, sonic backlights and bars of light were designed and built by the artist and then played by members of the Banda Sinfónica de Ciegos, an orchestra of blind musicians.

The bars of light turn on and off in chaotic patterns controlled by the performer, generating complex waveforms.

The turntables use a belt and pulley system activated by a hand crank that gets an acrylic disc to spin. Each of the discs has a different sound wave form carved out by a laser cutter. The performer plays the disc by spinning it and bringing a small flashlight closer to the perforated groove. Underneath it, a light sensor reads the fluctuations of light as it passes through the cutouts. An electronic circuit takes these fluctuations and turns them into voltage differences, in other words, into an analog sound signal.

A computer transforms these analog signals in real time using the SuperCollider software and spatializes them through an 8-channel Ambisonic array that surrounds the audience, creating an immersive sonic experience.

What the audience hears is the interaction of the waveform on the disc, the digital processes and the actions of the performers, who can modify dynamic envelope and duration, as well as volume by moving the light closer or farther from the disc, and pitch by spinning the disc faster or slower.

The backlights produce sound in a similar way, but the waveform cutouts are linear and performers manipulate sensors instead of lights.

By experimenting with alternative methods of sound inscription, La Biblioteca Ciega becomes a sonic speculation on reading and writing.

In Borges’s darkened library, blind musicians read to us a passage written in light and shadow, a language that can only be heard through the interaction between humans and machines.

An exhibition of work by graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts students from the Center of Digital and Experimental Arts (DXARTS). Fusing contemporary artistic practice with experimental technologies, the graduating artists explore time, space, perception, memory , and the sublime using video, stereoscopy, sound, installation and performance.

These immersive works play between the boundaries of physical and virtual realms, creating new art experiences that are both technically and conceptually innovative.

This show presents the work of eleven seniors and marks the completion of their Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees through the DXARTS program and the culmination of their artistic inquiry at the University of Washington.

The University of Washington School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) co-sponsor this series featuring groundbreaking new works and modern classics by faculty and guest composers. This concert features an evening of improvised experimental music by School of Music faculty members Luke Bergman (bass), Richard Karpen (piano), Juan Pampin (electronics), and Cuong Vu (trumpet), with special guests Matt Ingalls (clarinet) and Greg Sinibaldi (saxophone).

Sanctum is a public art work that uses the persistent flow of people around the Henry Art Gallery as input, extracting narratives from the demographics of passers-by and the patterns of their movement. The flow of people is used as a physical analogue to another type of crowd, the virtual inhabitants of social networks such as Facebook.

As a person approaches the gallery, they are tracked, analyzed and recorded by video cameras programmed to identify people according to their age and gender. They hear a cacophony of voices, all telling stories. As they get closer to the gallery, the voices become clearer, gradually becoming a single voice that matches their age and gender, and telling a story composed from demographically-appropriate Facebook status updates. A grid of 18 large video monitors on the façade of the gallery picks their face out of the crowd, automatically integrating footage of them with a variety of live and pre-recorded footage from around the gallery façade.

The installation aims to create a locus of complex and intense social networking activity, reaching out of the gallery to embed the passer by. As unexpected flâneurs, people passing by the Henry are assaulted by a multitude of voices, videos and text, of which, as they approach the façade, they will eventually become the focal point.

Join the Sanctum Facebook application [here]. By joining, your Facebook status updates will become content for Sanctum's narrative system. All posts that you make to Facebook will remain anonymous - they will be tagged with age and gender, but no other personal data will be used. If you visit Sanctum at the Henry Art Gallery, you can potentially see your status updates used as parts of the stories that are generated.

Argentina’s National Fund for the Arts (FNA) has awarded Nicolás Varchausky a grant to continue working on his cycle of 3D sound pieces called Resonances, Turbulences & Explosions, based on recordings of single phonemes. With FNA grant support, Varchausky will developed three new pieces using the recordings of the letters /t/, /a/ and /n/. The pieces are expected to be completed and premiered by May 2014. The first three pieces (/f/, /S/ and /k/) were commissioned by Secretaría de Cultura de La Nación Argentina and premiered on December of 2011.

Resonances, Turbulences and Explosions is a series of short acousmatic pieces for 3D sound that explore the inner soundscapes of each letter of the alphabet. Using analysis and re-synthesis techniques within an algorithmic composition environment, each piece takes the recording of a single phoneme to turn it inside out, unfolding in the process their latent acoustic beauty. The series takes its name from the basic acoustic properties of speech: when we speak, we filter turbulent streams of air, resonate in our heads periodic interruptions of those streams and release abruptly built up pressure under the glottis.

This long-term project represents the continuation of Varchausky's decade-long artistic research on the tensions between sound and meaning within spoken word, and its possibilities as a musical material. Evolving from his early pieces that explored the poetic resonances of everyday speech using field recordings and collage techniques, the current series reaches an utmost abstraction point on his research. By immersing ourselves in the hidden soundscapes within the smallest sonic units capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, the series becomes a search for language’s ultimate acoustic matter and meaning.

ON THE OBSERVING OF THE OBSERVER OF THE OBSERVERS
Phillips Museum of Art
Franklin & Marshall College
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Jan 30th - April 7th, 2013

"Sit, and wait. Stand, and walk. Proceed down a corridor, and enter a room. Listen, and react. Watch, and be watched. These, and other, more and less subtle cues and directives provide the logic behind James Coupe's installation, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, at The Phillips Museum of Art. Over the course of a six-week installation in winter 2012, the Rothman and Curriculum Galleries were transformed into an enclosed theatre of observation, where anyone may enter, participate in, and subsequently become the exhibition.

The exhibition is comprised of a network of rooms, some physical, some virtual, and some, both at once. Certain rooms are located within the museum's walls, while others are dispersed across the Franklin & Marshall campus, to be viewed remotely via multi-screen video feeds. Although most of these rooms appear generic and interchangeable, each is designed for a specific function: the installation layout includes a waiting room, a psychology testing room, the director's office, a control room, a screening room, a chapel, a classroom, and four corridors; whereas the cross-campus locations include a dining room, a computer lab, a holding cell, a library reading area, and a dorm room. The exhibition's maze-like layering of real and virtual spaces creates a kind of image echo-chamber, where the events seen on-screen appear at once familiar, routine, contained, and yet uncanny, erratic, and modular: a seemingly infinite regress of people and places.

Installed in each of the gallery rooms are cylindrical rings of high definition cameras affixed to ceiling-mounted steel poles, which have been configured to perpetually monitor a 360-degree view of their surroundings. The captured footage is then shown on the adjoining panels of computer monitors, which display panoramic yet spatially and temporally inconsistent video representations of each room and its visitors. Inconsistent, because computers process the video footage in real time, using facial recognition software to detect each visitor's presence, and custom algorithms to determine the exact quantity of people and the duration for which their image will be visible on screen. Processed, recombined, displayed and then re-displayed, the video feeds exhibit a circuit of selves, others, and resolute emptiness - the effect is a paradoxical sense of delayed immediacy, or perhaps, intimate estrangement, oscillating between past and present, near and distant, ordinary and strange."
- Excerpt from catalogue essay, "Waiting To Be Seen"

'What is the current that makes machinery', a new composition by Stelios Manousakis for voice and surround live electronics will be premiering at the 'Dag in de Branding' contemporary music festival in The Hague, the Netherlands, on Saturday March 9th as part of a tribute to singer Cathy Berberian.

‘What is the current that makes machinery’ is a cycle of short pieces for female voice and live electronics, written for vocalist Stephanie Pan and her unique capabilities in extended vocal techniques. The pieces are based on texts from the first section of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Tender Buttons: objects; food; rooms’, a collection of short prose-poems written in 1912. In these modernist texts, often characterized as ‘verbal cubism’ or ‘language art’, Stein composes with language not for the world it represents, but with its first matter - signs, sounds, rhythm, syntax and semantic fragments - treating it as a rediscovered aesthetic object that alludes to new worlds on the listener’s mind. The piece uses the voice and electronic processing to best reveal and amplify the complex multi-dimensional beauty of the texts and their inherent sonic, structural, and poetic musicality in a live setting.

About the festival
'Dag in de Branding' is the Hague's festival for contemporary music. In its 27th edition, 'Dag in de Branding' pushes borders. With Cathy Berberian, Peter Adriaansz, Greg Haines, Stelios Manousakis and Stephanie Pan.

Acknowledgments
The piece makes extensive use of technology that Stelios begun developing in the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) during a research seminar with composers/researchers Juan Pampin and Joseph Anderson. It also uses technologies developed in DXARTS by Joshua Parmenter, Richard Karpen and Juan Pampin.

Exhibited at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery,
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design,
2 West 13th St, New York City.
Part of The Public Private February 7 – April 17, 2013

Video cameras, monitors, computers

In this installation, a ring of five cameras is configured to continuously monitor a 360-degree field of view. The resulting panorama is then displayed on five screens on a wall. Software filters the video captured by the cameras to show only one person’s face on each screen. The footage of each person loops, only being replaced once a new person stands in front of one of the cameras.

The software demographically profiles these five people according to their age and gender and adds subtitles from corresponding Facebook status updates. For example, a 25-year-old male in the gallery is conjoined with text from a 25-year-old male on Facebook. The status updates function independently for each individual person, yet also work together as a narrative of five chunks of text representing the five demographics shown on the screens. Each time a new person enters the picture, the narrative is reconfigured without compromising the narrative across the five screens. Hence viewers find themselves in spatial and narrative dialogue/contact with four other previous occupants of the gallery, unable to remove themselves from scrutiny until somebody else puts themselves on display.

Pianist Cristina Valdes has performed across four continents. Committed to both contemporary and standard music, she is known for presenting innovative concerts with repertoire ranging from Bach to Xenakis. Her passionate interest in new music has led to collaborations with such renowned composers as Terry Riley, Joan Tower, Ezra Laderman, and Ned Rorem. She has also premiered the works of such younger composers as Evan Ziporyn, Orlando Garcia, and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez.

An avid chamber musician, Ms. Valdes has toured extensively with the Bang on a Can All-Stars and has performed with the Seattle Chamber Players, the Mabou Mines Theater Company, and the Parsons Dance Company. From 1998-2001, she was a member of the award-winning chamber music group Antares.

She has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including an Arts International Grant, the Thayer Award for the Arts, an Artist Trust GAP grant, an American Composers Forum Encore grant, the W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship, first prize in the Ruth Slenczynska Solo Piano Competition, the Silver Medal in the Osaka International Chamber Music Festa, and an Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music.

Ms. Valdes lives in Seattle, where she is the founder and director of the SLAM Festival, serves as Vice-President of the Board of the Washington Composers Forum, and is a Jack Straw artist-in-residence.

The concert was a part of Generations XVI - an annual event, organized by the Polish Radio, the Polish Composers Union and the Polish Society of Authors and Composers ZAIKS. This year it featured works by 4 composers: Paweł Buczyński, Krzysztof Meyer, Anna Zawadzka-Gołosz and Ewa Trębacz. The concert was broadcast live on the Polish Radio Programme II.

Ewa Trębacz's project was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland within the programme "Collections" - the priority "Composers' Commissions" implemented by the Institute of Music and Dance.

"Shadow Inverted" is an interactive video installation that uses video mapping to explore inverted space, where shadows are illuminated and serve as gateways into an inverted world. The piece is exhibited at the Microsoft Research Gallery until March 4th 2013.

Juan Pampin's piece "On Space" for percussion sextet and 3D electronic sounds has been released as part of Les Percussions de Strasbourg 50th Anniversary Edition 15-CD box. This box –released by Universal France and recently acquired by the UW Libraries– includes hirstorical recordings of pieces by Messiaen, Varese, Xenakis, Boulez, Cage, Serocki, etc., as well as more recent unpublished recordings by the group. The published on-location recording of On Space was entirely produced at DXARTS by Juan Pampin and Joseph Anderson.

Booklet Information

On Space (2000/2005), for percussion sextet and 3D electronic sounds

Juan Pampin

Commissioned by Les Percussions de Strasbourg and GRAME, Centre National de Création Artistique.

• Edited and mixed by Juan Pampin and Joseph Anderson at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle, USA

• Recorded and Mastered by Joseph Anderson

Technical:

• This recording was produced through the use of the Ambisonic Toolkit (ATK), and represents a first 'on location' application of the ATK production system. A Stereo Ambisonic UHJ recording.

• Microphones: Soundfield ST250, 8 x Schoeps MK5 (omnidirectional)

• Microphone Preamp: DACS Clarity MicAmp

Thanks:

• This recording was made possible through the support of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), and has been partially funded by the Royalty Research Fund of the University of Washington.

• Special thanks for technical assistance to Fernando Lopez-Lezcano and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.

Composer and researcher Joseph Anderson is in residency at DXARTS in the Winter quarter 2013. During his residency at DXARTS Joseph will lecture at the DXARTS 567 seminar Sound in Space and continue the development of the the Ambisonics Toolkit (ATK). Joseph will also collaborate with the tuning of DXARTS' newly remodeled 3D Audio Lab.

Commissioned for the 12th Seoul International New Media Festival, Unexpected Guests/Returning Ghosts No.2 continues a series of projects that explores immediate physical space, the internal space of memory, and the virtual spaces of digital media. While the first version of the installation collected an array of live Internet radio feeds from around the globe, No.2 uses an archive of sounds recorded locally throughout Seoul. As light is reflected off a pair of slowly moving mirrored windows, sounds are triggered by an array of light sensors organized throughout the gallery.

Rice's project was made possible with the support of the following:

The Center For Digital Arts and Experimental Media, The Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, The Fulbright Program, & The Korean-American Educational Commission.

For 2013 ONN/OF moves from a sweater factory in Ballard to a car dealership on Capitol Hill

DXARTS presents the second of two exhibitions of work by current PhD students, at their Fremont Warehouse space. This first exhibition features third year PhD student, Robert Twomey and fourth year Ha Na Lee:

Robert Twomey is an interdisciplinary artist exploring questions of embodiment, cognition and identity through installation, performance and interactive artwork. He holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BS from Yale University with majors in Biomedical Engineering (medical imaging concentration) and Art (painting concentration).

Ha Na Lee works primarily in video, performance, installation art, and experimental film, and has recently focused on making short videos and films that address inner experiences through abstract imagery in an experimental narrative form. She received her MFA at SUNY Stony Brook, recent exhibitions and screenings include Seoul, Tokyo, The Hague and Los Angeles.

Maja Petric is a guest artist and a keynote speaker at Illuminating Engineering Society's Annual Conference for emerging professionals.
On November 10th, 9 am at the University of Minnesota, Rapson Hall, 89 Church St SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

The University of Washington School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) co-sponsor this series featuring groundbreaking new works and modern classics by faculty and guest composers. In this concert, New Jersey-based Newband, directed by Dean Drummond, performs three masterworks by Harry Partch as well as pieces by Dean Drummond and Mathew Rosenblum. Program selections include Harry Partch: Castor and Pollux, Eleven Intrusions, and Barstow; Dean Drummond: Congressional Record or Before the Last Laugh; and Mathew Rosenblum: Yonah's Dream.

Newband was founded in 1977 by composer Dean Drummond and flutist Stefani Starin, who continue as Artistic Directors. With Drummond's invention of the 31-tone zoomoozophone in 1978, Newband began to explore music using microtonality and alternative tuning systems. In 1990, Newband received custodianship of the original Harry Partch Instrument Collection and has since been involved with resurrecting Partch’s great works while commissioning new works for what is now perhaps the most unique instrument collection in the world.

Newband has performed throughout North America and Europe including at The Library of Congress, Barbican Hall, The Walker Arts Center, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Avery Fisher Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen and The Knitting Factory. Newband has premiered works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Elizabeth Brown, John Cage, Dean Drummond, Joan La Barbara, Anne LeBaron, Harry Partch, Mathew Rosenblum, Ezra Sims, Lasse Thoresen, Lois V Vierk, Julia Wolfe and John Zorn, among numerous others. Newband has produced five CD’s, two on Mode, and one each on Music and Arts, Innova and Wergo; and performed on CD’s of music by Julia Wolfe (on Point) and Lasse Thoresen (on Aurora).

Newband currently consists of a core of nine virtuosic multi-instrumentalists and two singers, equally at home in concert performances and in productions involving theater, dance and film. Newband productions have included major works by Harry Partch: The Wayward (directed by Tom O’Horgan), Oedipus (directed by Bob McGrath), Daphne of the Dunes (choreographed by Alice Farley), Delusion of the Fury (directed by John Jesurun); and by Dean Drummond: a live soundtrack by for F.W. Murnau’s landmark silent film The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann), the chamber opera Café Buffé, and The Golden Bird for narrator, microtonal soloists and orchestra. Newband has pursued many educational projects, including in-school residencies and the creation of a new music children's show.

The Harry Partch Instrument Collection is the largest component of the Newband Instrumentarium, including all of the instruments built by the composer-inventor during the period 1930-1974, as well as several instruments replicated by the Harry Partch Foundation and Newband since 1974. Other instruments in the Newband Instrumentarium are the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods, both invented by Dean Drummond, microtonally programmed synthesizer, and a large collection of exotic percussion instruments. Newband performs on the Instrumentarium as well as standard Western instruments - flute, cello and percussion regularly - voices, clarinet, brass and strings as repertoire demands. Since 1999, Newband has been Artist Ensemble in Residence, with the Harry Partch Instrument Collection, at Montclair State University.

Dean Drummond

Dean Drummond is a composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, music instrument inventor, co-director of Newband, and Associate Professor and Director of the Harry Partch Institute in the John J Cali School of Music, at Montclair State University.

His music has been performed internationally in venues ranging from The Knitting Factory and The Kitchen to Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall and Barbican Center; has been recorded on five CD’s, and has received numerous awards and commissions including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts and The Library of Congress.

Drummond received degrees in music composition from the University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts. While a student, he worked as musician for and assistant to Harry Partch, performing in the premieres of some of Partch’s greatest works as well as on both Columbia Masterworks recordings of Partch’s music made during the late 1960's. Recent compositions include: Café Buffé (2006), a microtonal chamber opera; and The Golden Bird (2009), for narrator, microtonal soloists and orchestra and Round (2010), an electric guitar quartet.

As Co-director of Newband, Drummond has been Music Director of Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury at Japan Society, Oedipus at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Montclair State University, and The Wayward at The Bang on a Can Festival.

Drummond is inventor of the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods.

Mathew Rosenblum

Mathew Rosenblum's music explores how seemingly independent musical voices and traditions may be woven together into a newly expressive whole. Using a variety of tuning systems, his work does not live within traditional boundaries, creating a compelling fresh landscape.

His works have been performed throughout the world. A wide array of groups have commissioned and performed and recorded his music, such as The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Harry Partch Institute, The American Composers Orchestra, the Rascher Saxophone Quartet, the Chicago Contemporary Players, the Calmus Ensemble of Leipzig, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and Sequitur.

His honors include four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Music Fellowship Grants, a Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award, two Fromm Foundation Commissions, a National Endowment for the Arts Music Fellowship Grant, a Barlow Endowment Commission, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship Grant.

Rosenblum is Professor of composition and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also co-directs the Music on the Edge new music series.

Stelios Manousakis’ solo live electronics project is a sonic exploration of the intrinsic nature of digital technology through the merging of vocabularies and approaches from different ­‐ often seemingly clashing ­‐ realms of electronic music: noise, no­‐input music and glitch, with electroacoustic composition, with improvisation, with the most vibrant underground hardcore tekno (with a 'k').

About the festival

REWIRE is a small-scale, intimate festival for visual arts, new music and related arts.
The festival is being held in a fascinating transformational neighbourhood, around the power station in the Regentesse District of the Hague. Old and striking buildings, such as the former Seventh-day Adventist church and the old power plant warehouse will be temporarily transformed into intimate locations for concerts, an exhibition, performances, screenings and talks.

REWIRE includes both a daytime and a night-time programme. During the day, artist talks, tours and screenings will be held. The central exhibition is open to visitors all day, until midnight. At night, a range of innovative concerts and performances will take place.

Tapestry, a composition by DXARTS Ph.D. student Hector Bravo Benard for the 31-tone per octave Fokker organ, controlled by a computer, will be performed again in Amsterdam on October 14, as part of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation series of microtonal music concerts. The program also includes pieces by Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979), Peter Schat (1935-2003), and Felipe Waller (1971) ao.

The University of Washington School of Music and The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) co-sponsor the new Music of Today concert series featuring groundbreaking modern classics and new works by faculty, students and guest composers. This concert features works by graduate Composition and DXARTS students Shih-Wei Lo, Hector Bravo-Benard, Marcin Pączkowski, Anthony Vine, Stelios Manousakis, and Ivan Arteaga.

DXARTS presents the first of two exhibitions of work by current PhD students, at their Fremont Warehouse space. This first exhibition features two incoming students, Inmi Lee and Joel Ong:

Inmi Lee (http://www.inmilee.net/) is an artist, researcher and educator interested in cultural analysis. Through sculptures, videos, installation, interactive art, and performance art, her work provokes awareness of capacity and limits of culture and forces the viewer to question how and why we assign value and meaning to culture.

Joel Ong (http://www.arkfrequencies.com/) is a media artist working at the intersections of sound, science and experimental media. He has recently completed a Masters degree at SymbioticA majoring in Biological Arts and has an undergraduate degree in the life sciences.

The work will be presented to the general public from 6-8pm, Thursday 11 October. The Fremont Warehouse is located at 102 1/2 N. 36th St, Seattle 98103. Directions can be found here:

Abby Aresty's site-specific installation Paths II: The Music of Trees is now up and running in Seattle's Washington Park Arboretum (WPA). This is Abby's DMA dissertation piece and has been produced at DXARTS. To read more about the piece you can vist the project website, you can also read this article on the Seattle Times, the one on UWToday, or even check out NPR's coverage of the piece online.

If you live in the Seattle area, you can visit the piece Wednesdays 3-6 pm and Saturdays/Sundays from 10:30 am - 1:30 pm through the month of October. Abby will be giving public tours on October 13 and 14 at 10:30 am and 12 pm.

The Director of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) is pleased to announce the opening of Tivon Rice’s solo exhibition Arcade Zero.

Current SeMA Artist in Residence and recipient of a 2011 Fulbright Research Grant in Visual Art, Rice has spent the last year studying the speeds and scale of urban transformation in South Korea. Focusing on a number of sites in Seoul, this research has contributed to a diverse body of work, including photography, sculpture, video, sound, and installation, that explores how memory is constructed, contained, and altered in space.

Arcade Zero specifically brings together materials observed, collected, and fabricated in Sewoon Market, a soon-to-be-demolished series of arcade blocks in downtown Seoul. Combining neon lighting, live sound, and delayed video from an array of motion controlled closed-circuit cameras, the system reflects an environment in constant flux; alternately emerging and receding, yet ever out of phase with the surrounding space.

Rice's research is generously supported by The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), The Fulbright Commission, The Korean-American Educational Commission, The Seoul Museum of Art, and The University of Washington Graduate School.

Organised Sound is an international peer-reviewed journal which focuses on the rapidly developing methods and issues arising from the use of technology in music today. It concentrates upon the impact which the application of technology is having upon music in a variety of genres, including multimedia, performance art, sound sculpture and music ranging from popular idioms to experimental electroacoustic composition. It provides a unique forum for anyone interested in electroacoustic music studies, its creation and related developments to share the results of their research as they affect musical issues.

Please join DXARTS and B-term Digital Video Foundations Course as we welcome NYC based artist collective Same Same But Different(Amanda Valdez, Jay Gaskill, and Fabian Tabibian) . Following their artist presentations, Molly Mac and students from her DXARTS digital video course will host an active, open forum discussion exploring the way that formal issues of time, narrative and composition in these contemporary painters' practices may overlap with and inform issues in digital video artmaking (and vice versa).

Seattle's Soil Gallery hosts Same Same But Different for an exhibition August 1- Sept 1, 2012. Opening Reception August 2, 6-8pm. The group recently presented an exciting debut exhibition as a collective at Brooklyn's Parallel Art Space, and will continue to tour their collaborative around the US in 2012-2013. As a collective they are committed to engaging with unique creative communities and conversations in each city they visit.

Special thanks to UW Center for DXARTS for making this event possible!

Cornish College of the Arts is proud to present the 2012 Neddy at Cornish Exhibition. This show marks the inaugural year of the Neddy at Cornish program, celebrating the work of a selection of artists from the region who embody the spirit of the Neddy Award. Over the last 16 years, the Neddy Award has celebrated and propelled the careers of artists who have demonstrated outstanding artistic achievement while maintaining a lively connection to their community. This exhibition features the work of all eight nominees, from both the original painting category and the new "open medium" category, now annually including artists who work in any combination of visually-based media.

From the traditional to the cutting-edge, Gala Bent, Cynthia Camlin, James Coupe, Eirik Johnson (Neddy Recipient in Open Medium), Lead Pencil Studio, Susie J. Lee, Jeremy Mangan, and Stacey Rozich (Neddy Recipient in Painting) employ a diverse range of techniques and themes. Climate change, surveillance monitoring, migrant work camps, personal mythologies, and the dynamic relationships between technology, architecture, and the body represent a few of the ideas explored in the exhibition. The 2012 Neddy at Cornish Exhibition is both a celebration and affirmation of the accomplishments of all eight artists and the distinct creative sensibilities from our region.

Additionally celebrating the arrival of the Neddy Award at Cornish, we are featuring a concurrent exhibition of paintings by the award's namesake, Ned Behnke. Curated by Peggy Weiss, Reflections will bring together a selection of paintings from multiple bodies of work, over the course of Behnke's life.

The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) announces the DXARTS 2012 BFA Art Exhibition. The exhibit will be at the DXARTS Fremont Fab Lab, located at 102 1/2 NW 36th St in Seattle, WA. New video, systems, and sculpture works produced by graduating seniors will be featured. An opening reception will be held June 8th, 2012. The exhibit will be free and open to the public until June 10th, 2012 from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

Fusing contemporary artistic practice with experimental technologies, the DXARTS 2012 BFA Art Exhibition explores space, perception, and memory using video, stereoscopy, and installation. This show presents the work of fourteen seniors and marks both the completion of their Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees through the DXARTS program and the culmination of their artistic inquiry at the University of Washington. These immersive works are interrogations of physical, psychological, and virtual spaces, making use of a variety of innovative techniques and technologies.

Founded in 2001, the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) is an interdisciplinary degree program at the University of Washington designed to support the emergence of a new generation of hybrid artists. DXARTS fosters the invention of new forms by synthesizing expanded studio research with pioneering advances in digital computing, information technologies, performance, science, and engineering. For more information about DXARTS, feel free to contact us via email at dxarts@u.washington.edu or visit our website at http://www.dxarts.washington.edu/.

Stelios Manousakis is presenting a paper titled 'WLAN trilateration for musical echolocation in the installation ‘The Network Is A Blind Space’' at this year's New Interfaces for Musical Expression International Conference (NIME 2012), in Ann Arbor, Michigan (21-23 May 2012).
Paper abstract
This paper presents the system and technology developed for the distributed, micro-telematic, interactive sound art installation, The Network Is A Blind Space. The piece uses sound to explore the physical yet invisible electromagnetic spaces created by Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). To this end, the author created a framework for indoor WiFi localization, providing a variety of control data for various types of ‘musical echolocation’. This data, generated mostly by visitors exploring the installation while holding WiFi-enabled devices, is used to convey the hidden properties of wireless networks as dynamic spaces through an artistic experience.

About the conference
The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) is an annual interdisciplinary conference discussing contemporary topics in electronic musical interface design, research and practice. The NIME conference started out as a workshop at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in 2001, and has grown into one of the largest and most vital international conferences within the field of music technology.
The NIME conference brings together researchers and practitioners from a range of academic fields including computer science, electrical engineering, human-computer interaction, musicology, electro-acoustic music, dance and composition, and has routinely attracted interest from electronic music industry as well.

Critically acclaimed New York new music group, the JACK Quartet presents a program of works by UW composers Joel-François Durand, Huck Hodge, Richard Karpen, and Juan Pampin in this performance capping off a weeklong residency at the UW.

The members of the quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music, and they have since studied with the Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

JACK has recent and upcoming performances at the SONiC Festival as hosts of the Extended Play Marathon at Miller Theatre, Vancouver New Music (Canada), Strathmore Hall, cresc...Biennale für Moderne Musik (Germany), National Gallery of Art, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, Le Poisson Rouge performing with pianist Ursula Oppens, Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts performing with composer/guitarist Steven Mackey, Carnegie Hall Choral Institute performing with the Young People's Chorus of New York City, the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik (Germany) performing string octets with the Arditti Quartet, and the Athelas New Music Festival (Denmark).

Throughout 2012-2014, JACK will join legendary pianist Maurizio Pollini as a part of his Perspectives series with performances at the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Suntory Hall (Japan), Cité de la Musique (France), Staatsoper Unter den Linden (Germany), and Teatro alla Scala (Italy). Additionally this year, JACK will be the featured ensemble for the 2012 Finale® National Composition Contest in partnership with MakeMusic and the American Composers Forum.

JACK has led workshops with young composers at Princeton University, Yale University, the American String Teachers Association of New Jersey, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Germany), New York University, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Eastman School of Music, University at Buffalo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, University of Huddersfield (United Kingdom), University of Washington, University of Victoria (Canada), and Manhattan School of Music. In addition to working with composers and performers, JACK seeks to broaden and diversify the potential audience for new music through educational presentations designed for a variety of ages, backgrounds, and levels of musical experience.

EVENTThe Improvised Music Project (IMP) presents the Vu-Karpen Project in the final evening of IMPfest IV. Seattle group Chemical Clock, featuring students from the UW Jazz Studies Program, is also on the bill. Details at www.improvisedmusicproject.com.

Vu-Karpen Project

The Vu-Karpen Project is a highly experimental ensemble, formed to explore and invent new methods of creating works of complex, instinctive, and dramatic new music. The project, which also includes live computer interaction, seeks to make some important discoveries while developing an exciting concert-length work built on the foundations and traditions of Jazz and Western Classical Art Music.

The project is led by two University of Washington School of Music faculty, both internationally renowned for their innovative music making: Cuong Vu, a trail-blazing Jazz trumpeter/band leader/composer, and Richard Karpen, a leading composer and computer music pioneer who also plays piano in the ensemble. The Project also includes Ted Poor on drums and Luke Bergman on electric bass. Ted Poor is rapidly becoming widely admired and sought after internationally for his powerful, virtuosic, and intellectually intense drumming. Luke Bergman is a rising star in the Jazz scene and a graduate of the UW Jazz Studies Program.

Chemical Clock

Cameron Sharif, Ray Larsen, Evan Woodle and Mark Hunter are Chemical Clock. Finding themselves together within the darkened recesses of the University of Washington's music building, these four undergraduates united in their common desire to experiment in new musical territories — the bleeding-edge kind of stuff they’d never learn about in jazz college.

Under the influence of professor Cuong Vu, who fervently supported their artistic explorations, Chemical Clock has taken to it in earnest since the early days of 2009. Of their sound: this quartet is decidedly more "dance club" than "jazz club." Combining elements of electronica and rock with jazz-informed improvisational sensibilities, it’s no straightforward task to adequately describe the Chemical Clock canon.

To behold, their live thing is a heavy-hitting, beat-laden, thrash-and-bash spectacle. You’d sooner envision yourself bobbing and flailing amid the crowd along to the Clock’s jams before you’d consider taking a seat for a polite listening session at some genteel supper joint (you know, maybe over an exorbitantly-priced hummus platter or something). With effected and reverberant trumpeting, bit-crushed keys, explosive drum-setsmanship and ironclad bass-work, Chemical Clock pilots their way through nigh-unnavigable passages of composition, deftly maneuvering through sinewy melodic channels with studied fluency. In tandem, the ensemble whiplashes to and fro betwixt convulsive improvisation and calculated musical constructions with a coherency that often seems telepathic.

Technology plays a crucial role across a broad spectrum of sonic activity, offering new cognitive frameworks and reshaping social networks in ways that challenge the conventional binary of the individual subject versus the collective. It mediates performance and listening, provides new modes of analysis, and inspires musical creation. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nexus of social, cultural, and political issues in and around music, cognition, and technology.

Keynotes will be given by Eric Clarke (University of Oxford), Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill University) and Robert Gjerdingen (Northwestern University). The guest composer will be Tod Machover (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

In the the early 1990s the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a exchange program between two important west-coast computer centers: the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD, and the Laboratorio de Investigación y Producción Musical (LIPM) of the city of Buenos Aires, directed at that time by electronic music pioneer Francisco Kröpfl. During this exchange program, Argentine composers affiliated with LIPM had the opportunity to be in residency at these centers for several months, learning computer music and composing new works. The program completely transformed the landscape of electronic music in Argentina and many of the composers that took part of it became the next generation of experts in the field. Two decades later, three of the composers that participated of this exchange gather at the UW to present their latest works, distant echoes of those first steps into the world of computer music.

In conjunction with the College’s 150th anniversary, DXARTS undergraduate, Gaelen Sayres, was nominated and selected to receive a “Future Timeless Award.”

The College will be honoring 150 distinguished alumni and graduating seniors at the first-ever Timeless Awards Gala. Awardees include recipients of the College’s Distinguished Alumnus and UWAA’s Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus awards (“Past” awardees); alumni who are being honored for the first time (“Present” awardees); as well as graduating seniors and graduate students (“Future” awardees).

Gaelen was one of 20 graduating seniors and graduate students to receive this honor.

The School of Music presents groundbreaking new works and modern classics by faculty and guest composers. Program highlights include an appearance by the Vu-Karpen Project, an experimental new music group featuring School of Music Director Richard Karpen on piano, Jazz Studies Associate Professor Cuong Vu on trumpet, New-York-based musician Ted Poor on drums, and Jazz Studies instructor Luke Bergman on electric bass.

The Vu-Karpen Project is a highly experimental ensemble, formed to explore and invent new methods of creating works of complex, instinctive, and dramatic new music. The project, which also includes live computer interaction, seeks to make some important discoveries while developing an exciting concert-length work built on the foundations and traditions of Jazz and Western Classical Art Music. The project is led by two University of Washington School of Music faculty, both internationally renowned for their innovative music making: Cuong Vu, a trail-blazing Jazz trumpeter/band leader/composer, and Richard Karpen, a leading composer and computer music pioneer who also plays piano in the ensemble. The Project also includes Ted Poor on drums and Luke Bergman on electric bass. Ted Poor is rapidly becoming widely admired and sought after internationally for his powerful, virtuosic, and intellectually intense drumming. Luke Bergman is a rising star in the Jazz scene and a graduate of the UW Jazz Studies Program.

Composer and researcher Joseph Anderson is in residency at DXARTS in the Winter quarter 2012. During his residency at DXARTS Joseph is working with Josh Parmenter on the Supercollider release of the Ambisonics Toolkit (ATK) and with Juan Pampin doing research on 3D audio spatial up-sampling and High Order Ambisonics (HOA).

"La biblioteca ciega", a site-specific sound art performance by Nicolas Varchausky has been nominated by one of this year's jury members for Prix Ars Electronica 2012, in the Interactive Art category. The piece was commissioned by Secretaría de Cultura de La Nación Argentina for the old reading room of the former National Library, once ran by Borges, and uses a series of instruments that turn light into sound. Mechanical photo-sensitive turntables, sonic backlights and bars of light are manipulated by members of the National Orchestra of Blind Musicians and expanded through live electronics into a 3D surround sound space.

Stelios Manousakis - The sound of the network: WLAN echolocation for art

Stelios has developed a method of network echolocation to explore the physical yet invisible electromagnetic spaces created by Wireless Local Area Networks for his sound art installation 'The Network Is A Blind Space' (on exhibit at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery until 2/3/12). He will be talking about the technology behind the piece.

Maja Petrić -Transforming the poetic experience of space with light

Maja will be presenting on her work that focuses on changing the perception of space in function of art. Therefore, the subjects of my work are perception, space and, art. To change perception, I study sensation, experience, and phenomenology. To create spatial situations, I practice designing spaces, fabricating structures, manipulating materials, and integrating lighting and audiovisual systems.

The San Fransisco Tape Music Festival
January 20-22, 2012
ODC Theater
3153 17th
San Francisco

America's only festival devoted to the performance of audio works projected in three-dimensional space, with three distinct evenings of classic audio art and new fixed media compositions by 25 local and international composers. Hear members of the SF Tape Music Collective, along with guest composers, shape the sound live over a pristine surround system consisting of 16+ high-end loudspeakers while the audience is seated in complete darkness. It's a unique opportunity to experience music forming - literally - around you.

Megas Diakosmos ('Μέγας Διάκοσμος', roughly translating to ‘The Great Order of the Universe') takes its name from a lost cosmological treatise written by Leukippos, an ancient Greek natural philosopher of the 5th century BCE. In this treatise, Leukippos introduced for the first time an Atomic Theory of cosmology, surprisingly comparable to contemporary cosmological theories. Very little is known about the work, but according to remarks of other ancient writers, Leukippos postulated that the universe consists of tiny, invisible, indestructible, unchangeable and indivisible 'Atoms' (the 'Being') differing only in size and shape, and of 'Void' (the 'Non-being'), that exists in-between atoms and has also material properties, although different (anti-matter?). This infinitely expanding and contracting void allows atoms to move and collide eternally, creating and destroying matter, new bodies, and our world, but also a vast number of other worlds in the universe, some inhabited some not.
Leukippos' atomic theory and turbulent cosmogonic vision form the conceptual and experiential starting points for the composition, its sonorities and their development throughout the piece, as well as for the system and sound synthesis methods used. The system is a cybernetic model based on digital feedback and implemented as a sonic complex dynamical system – mathematically similar to a cosmological entity or universe in motion. This sonic universe is defined by the sample-by-sample interactions of a single binary digit (One, or ‘Being’) moving incessantly within a world of Void (Zeros, or ‘Non-being’). This digit floats and collides, is fused and split from delayed copies of itself, thus creating countless sonic bodies in states of equilibrium, oscillation, chaotic behavior, noise and silence.
Although Megas Diakosmos is a fixed medium piece, all the different ‘worlds’ (layers and sections) were performed in real-time using a hands-on, live electronics version of the system to maintain an aspect of ‘in-time’ timelessness, and to accentuate the primal and visceral character of the composition.

The Network Is a Blind Space is a distributed, micro-telematic, site-specific sound installation that explores the physical yet invisible electromagnetic spaces created by Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Two computers installed in opposite parts of Jack Straw, one in the gallery and another in the main studio, create an electromagnetic line-space that can be transversed and examined – perhaps broken. The piece spreads out from the gallery space, extending as far as the installation’s WLAN can reach. Sound is generated and modified in real time by visitors logging into the network with ordinary, wifi-enabled, mobile electronic devices (smartphones, iPods, tablets, laptops, etc).

Wireless network spaces co-exist with physical spaces but follow their own rules, which are not always intuitive from the point of view of physical experience. To explore and navigate them a new sense is needed, as vision falls short. In nature, many animals that inhabit environments where vision is not a sufficient navigational tool – such as bats and dolphins – have developed echolocation, transmitting sound and listening to the echoes of the space. The Network Is a Blind Space creates a type of musical echolocation to explore this hidden dimension within the particular spatial configuration of Jack Straw. Devices joining the network become part of the space as active nodes and resonant objects; each can be heard individually as its sound is played from a dome of speakers hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. The state of the system, from the point of view of each of its two computers, can also be listened to via two speakers located on the gallery floor – where the architectural plan of Jack Straw is marked out with tape – each at the respective spot of the computer it represents. Additionally, iPods and iPhones can be used as sound-making echolocation sonars after installing an application.

This cross-departmental collaboration explores concepts of tenderness and fragility with a multi-sensory journey allowing viewers to experience the entire museum in unexpected ways. Upon entering the Henry viewers move through the interstitial spaces — hallways, stairwells, elevators, ramps — experiencing sound, light, and dance. These small environments create places of vulnerability, playfulness, intimacy, fragility and cruelty among a tightly knit group, choreographed by Salk.

Using light and projection technology, Petrić’s installations will appear in distinct locations in the Henry where the dancers interact. In the Stroum gallery, a large wall provides the backdrop to the main dance; it slowly “cracks” and discloses an illusion of a realm behind the wall.

*Performances are on January 26, 27, and February 2, 3 at 7:30PM and January 28, 29, and February 4 at 2:00PM. All performances are non-ticketed and free with museum admission.

*Petrić’s mixed media installation can be viewed from January 26 until February 4, 2012.

Funding for Eyes of the Skin is provided by the University of Washington Donald E. Petersen Endowment for Excellence.

Juan Pampin and Mike McCrea travelled to Taipei to present a DXARTS concert as part of the 2011 International Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology (WOCMAT) in Taipei, Taiwan. Juan will give a keynote presentation on his work called Sound and Space: from the Auditory to the Corporeal.

2011 International Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology (WOCMAT 2011) welcomes Music and Paper Submissions which correspond to the computer music or audio technology related subjects. WOCMAT, established in 2005 at National Taiwan University, has been hosted annually by music, computer science or engineering departments/schools at various universities in Taiwan, and has gathered international researchers, scholars and renowned guests from both the music and technology domains. WOCMAT 2011 will be organized by the Music Digital Archives Center and the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan Normal University on December 2-4.

WOCMAT 2011 will invite world-renowned scholars to present their recent findings in music and research; the guests include Cort Lippe from the University of Buffalo, Marc Battier from the Paris Sorbonne University, Arshia Cont and Benoit Meudic from the IRCAM, Juan Pampin from the DXARTS at University of Washington, etc. The Workshop will consist of music performance, paper presentation, guest lecture and forum, and especially this year, it will collaborate with the Asian Composers League Music Festival and the Taiwan-France Orchid Project.

Music and Paper Submissions will go through a rigorous reviewing process supervised by both the Music and Technical Program Committee

Nicolas Varchausky will be performing in Buenos Aires at the premiere of "LA BIBLIOTECA CIEGA, an acoustic exploration of the alphabet and three photo-sensitive volumes", on Sunday December 4th, 8PM at Centro Nacional de la Música (Mexico 564). The piece was commissioned by Secretaría de Cultura de La Nación Argentina for the old reading room of the former Argentine National Library, once ran by B...orges, and it's composed in two chapters: 1. Resonances, Turbulences and Explosions, and 2. Photo-Sensitive Volumes I-III. In the first one, three electronic pieces are presented in complete darkness and surround sound, each one realized out of the recording of a different consonant. These recordings were analyzed and re-synthesized revealing through algorithmic processing their inner soundscape. In the second one, members of the Banda Sinfónica de Ciegos (an orchestra of blind musicians) manipulate live a series of instruments that turn light into sound. Mechanical photo-sensitive turntables, sonic backlights and bars of light will be expanded through live electronics to create three performatic sound pieces.

At the end of last year the Henry Art Gallery issued an open international call for artists, soliciting proposals for a site-specific, large-scale temporary media project to transform the façade of the museum's main entrance. The ultimate goal of this project is to engage an artist or artist team to create a visually striking and attention-grabbing work that exhibits a unique and captivating artistic vision, while engaging the thousands of UW students, faculty, staff, and visitors who pass by the Henry every day. The call resulted in 91 entries.

The selection committee that juried the proposals comprised: Sylvia Wolf, Director of the Henry Art Gallery; Elizabeth Brown, Henry Chief Curator; Sara Krajewski, Henry Curator; Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts and Director of the Media Studies Graduate Program at The New School; Daniel Friedman, Dean of the University of Washington’s College of the Built Environment; Bill True, Henry Board of Trustees Chairman; and Linden Rhoads, Vice Provost of UW Tech Transfer; Sarah Barton, MD, and Richard Barton, co-founder of expedia.com, zillow.com, and pozit.com

In late spring 2011, the jury selected three finalists, who were each given a stipend to further develop their concepts. Those three were Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson, design principles of Future Cities Lab; James Coupe and Juan Pampin, who are currently both Professors at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington; and Ed Purver, a New York-based artist whose practice includes participatory, interactive and site-specific installations with an orientation towards public art. The candidates made final presentations to the jury on Friday November 18th.

After careful consideration of all three proposals, the jury selected Sanctum, a project proposed by James Coupe and Juan Pampin that will investigate the narrative potential of social media as well as raise provocative questions about profiling and privacy in our day. Their project will create a locus of complex social networking activity that reaches out of the Henry Art Gallery to engage the passerby, whose demographic profile activates and gives shape to an emerging audiovisual narrative.

As individuals approach the Henry façade, they will see a bank of video monitors apparently reflecting faces from the crowd. They soon hear a curious cacophony of murmuring voices, that follows them as they walk by. Meanwhile, video surveillance cameras and computers with facial recognition software are analyzing them, using their demographic data to retrieve Facebook status posts and tweets from users with similar profiles. As they stop to look at the monitors they will see collected texts in narrative streams that appear as subtitles. These texts are generated from live and archived video footage captured on site. The narrative becomes a new form of oral storytelling as it is recited by text-to-speech software and beamed at passersby via ultrasound. Sanctum will be initiated and realized in 2012.

Coupe and Pampin are Professors at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. James Coupe received his PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He works with systems, autonomy, and networks. His recent works (re)collector and The Lover use computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information recontextualized into narratives. Juan Pampin is an Argentine composer and sound artist with a Master of Arts in Computer Music from the CNSM de Lyon, France and a Doctorate of Musical Arts in composition from Stanford University. His work explores the territory delineated by the concepts of site, memory, and materiality, considering listening as an active process of self reflection.

The jury for this competition offered the following: “It was a pleasure and a privilege to review three such rich and varied projects. We express our thanks and appreciation to all three finalists for the thought, intelligence, and creativity that went into their presentations. Ultimately, we selected Coupe and Pampin’s Sanctum for its artistic merit and conceptual rigor. This work integrates sound, visuals, and text to engage with highly relevant issues surrounding surveillance and profiling. By developing stories based on Facebook posts, it explores the ambiguity of how we negotiate identity in social media. It also questions how computer-based systems create narratives on the basis of collected data. An interactive piece, it investigates the paradoxical relationship between voyeurism and exhibitionism. Sanctum has the potential of engaging every member of the University of Washington community, by opening a productive space for a critical encounter with contemporary technology.”

Henry Director, Sylvia Wolf, adds: “We are particularly excited to launch this project in 2012, which marks the Henry’s 85th anniversary. From it’s founding in 1927, the Henry has championed contemporary art and fostered a campus- and region-wide culture of creativity. By commissioning a work that engages current topics in art and technology, the Henry fulfills its mission to advance the art, artists, and ideas of our time. We are deeply grateful to Sarah and Rich Barton, and to Linden Rhoads, for being the catalysts and benefactors of this important initiative. Their vision and support will provide a provocative and transformative experience for all who encounter Sanctum.”

About the Henry Art Gallery

THE HENRY ADVANCES THE ART, ARTISTS, AND IDEAS OF OUR TIME.

Since its founding in 1927, the Henry Art Gallery has served the Pacific Northwest as a pioneer in bringing contemporary art and ideas to the region. The Henry is a hub for audiences of all ages to experience the discovery, wonder, and surprise that contemporary art, artists, and ideas provide. The Henry staff, board, and community are committed to taking risks, and fostering dialogue and debate. Exhibitions, collections, and public programs at the Henry stimulate research and teaching at the University of Washington, provide a creative wellspring for artists, students, and educators, and reveal a record of modern artistic inquiry from the advent of photography in the mid-19th century to the multidisciplinary art and design of the 21st century.

Stelios Manousakis will perform "Fantasia on a Single Number" at the Audio Art Festival, in Krakow, Poland

Audio Art is an experimental and postmodernist art of the close of XX century and the beginning of the XXI century. Audio Art is an integration of sound and visual arts. Presentation of Audio Art appears in form of the concert, performance and installation. Audio Art creates new concept of sound source: as an object and musical instrument in certain space and time. Audio Art is a "one person art": designer, composer, sound artist and performer unify the whole process of art creation. Audio Art uses low and high technology. Audio Art Festival presents premiere projects from all over the world.

Premiere and screenings of Jeanette Groenendaal's film Reformation (2011, 82'), with music composed by Stelios Manousakis and Stephanie Pan; Reformation is an official selection of the International Documentary Film Festival 2011 (IDFA) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, under the category 'Paradocs',

IDFA is one of the world's leading documentary film festivals, held annually in Amsterdam since 1988. 'Paradocs' is a program in which the "periphery" of the documentary genre takes center stage. It showcases what is going on beyond the frame of traditional documentary filmmaking, on the borders between film and art, truth and fiction and narrative and design.

Digital Music presented by the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) and the University of Washington, Seattle. This concert will be given in a full 3D sound presentation using DXARTS' 12.6 audio system. The concert will feature works by graduate students Daniel Peterson, Abby Aresty, Stelios Manousakis, and Nicolás Varchausky, as well as the world premiere of "A Line (Part I, IDA)" by School of Music composition faculty and DXARTS Director, Juan Pampin.

A paper written by Nicolás Varchausky, Scott Carver and Michael McCrea on the Tertulia Project (a collaboration with artist Eduardo Molinari) will be presented in Seoul at the Korean Electro Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS). The event is part of the Seoul International Computer Music Festival (SICMF 2011)

The paper focuses on the sound component of the installation, reviewing its sonic ideas on form and content as well as the computer framework developed for the project.

The Tertulia Project was originally produced by the Eurokaz Festival in Croatia.

Based on her doctoral dissertation research, Ewa Trebacz will present "Depth Modulation: Visual Music in Immersive Media Environments" at the 2011 Understanding Visual Music Conference in Montreal.

UVM is a two-day conference focused on developing an understanding of the practice of visual music, its definition, related creative and perceptual considerations, current trends, technological innovation, and possible future directions.

Thousands of students, faculty,staff, and visitors walk past the Henry’s entrance every day. To better engage these passersby and make the public face of the Henry more dynamic,the Henry Art Gallery initiated the Façade Window Project. In late 2010the museum issued an international open call to artistssoliciting proposals for a site-specific, large-scale media project that would transform the façade of the museum’s main entrance. The goal of the Project is tocreate a site-specificinstallation that is visually striking and attention-grabbing, arousing interest in and curiosity about the Henryandpresentinga unique and captivating artistic vision.This new art installation will serve as a beacon for the museumandas an invitation to the campus and larger community to come participate in the art and dialogue happening at the Henry.

Sarah and Richard Barton (Barton Family Foundation) and Linden Rhoads,Vice Provost of UW Tech Transfer,in an exemplary display ofleadership and commitment, funded the initiative with significant lead gifts. Both Linden and Sarah have been longtime friends and supporters of the Henry Art Gallery; both have served multiple terms on theHenry Gallery AssociationBoard of Trustees.

Submissions were received from ninety-one artists, architects, and art-making teams.The selection committee that juried proposals comprised:

Sylvia Wolf,Director of the Henry Art Gallery

Elizabeth Brown,Henry Chief Curator

Sara Krajewski,Henry Curator

Christiane Paul,Whitney Museum Adjunct Curatorof New Media Artsand Director of the Media Studies Graduate Program at The New School

Daniel Friedman,Dean of the University of Washington’s College of the Built Environment

After careful debate the jury has selected threefinalists, who willeachbe given a $5,000 stipend to further develop their concepts before the finalcommission is awarded.The finalists will be asked to complete a site visit before making their final presentations to the jury in November. The commission of $45,000 with an additional $15,000 artist honorarium will be awarded in December andconstruction willbegin shortly thereafter. The completed projectwill be unveiled in spring or summer 2012.

The finalists:

Nataly GattegnoandJason Kelly Johnsonare the design principles ofFuture City Labs, an experimental art, design, and research office based in San Francisco, California and Athens, Greece. Bothhold aMaster of Architecture degree from Princeton University. Gattegno also holds a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University, St. Johns College, UK; Johnson received his BS from the University of Virginia. Their work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Most recentlyGattegno and Johnson were the 2008-09 Muschenheim and Oberdick Fellows at the University of Michigan; the 2009 New York Prize Fellows at the VanAlen Institute in New York City; andhaveexhibited work at the 2009-10 Hong Kong / Shenzhen Biennale, the Extension Gallery in Chicago, and the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

James CoupeandJuan Pampin are Associate Professors at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington.James Coupe received his PhD in Digital Art and Experimental Media from the University of Washington and an MA in Creative Technology from the University of Salford, Manchester, UK. His recent works(re)collector andSurveillance Suite use computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information that he recontextualizes into narratives.Juan Pampin is an Argentine composer and sound artist with a Master of Arts in Computer Music from the Conservatoire Nationalin Lyon, France and a Doctorate of Musical Arts in composition from Stanford University. Hiswork explores the territory delineated by the concepts of site, memory, and materiality, considering listening as an active process of self reflection.

Ed Purver is a New York-based artist whose practice includes participatory, interactive, and site-specific installations with an orientation towards public art. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University and a Master of Arts from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He recently completedIn Residence, a site-specific video installation commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial. He held a 2010 Fellowship in Video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has collaborated with and consulted for leading companies in the fields of lighting, theatre and architecture.

"Fantasia on a Single Number" by Stelios Manousakis and Nicolas Varchausky 's "Speaker Performance Kiosk" will be performed at ICMC 2011.

The 2011 International Computer Music Conference will be hosted by CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music, at the University of Huddersfield, England.

The International Computer Music Association is an international affiliation of individuals and institutions involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music. It serves composers, engineers, researchers and musicians who are interested in the integration of music and technology.

ART ON THE Z-AXIS: A presentation of works in progress by the Stereoscopy Research Group.

The Stereoscopy Research Group would like to invite you to a showcase of works in progress. The group has spent the past year making investigations into the aesthetics and technique of stereoscopic art. Short films, video installations, video sculpture, project proposals, and technical developments will be featured at the presentation. The presentation will be followed by a short reception.

James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. His recent work with ‘surveillance cinema’ explores the witting and un-witting relationship between the artist/participant and the viewer/participant. This method of ‘surveillance cinema’ utilizes computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage from a variety of sources including YouTube clips, studio footage, and surveillance camera feeds. The footage is then algorithmically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often using cinematic ‘templates’ such as Antonioni’s classic film Blow-Up.

James Coupe has exhibited both nationally and internationally, receiving awards from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award, Creative Capital and Artist’s Trust.

The Talent Show is organized by Peter Eleey for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and is made possible by generous support from the David Tieger Foundation and Ann M. Hatch. Presentation at the Henry is supported by ArtsFund and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. Special thanks to media sponsor Seattle Weekly.

Heather Raikes, who completes her PhD in DXARTS this quarter, has been awarded the inaugural Arts & Sciences Dean's Graduate Medal in the Arts. She will be acknowledged at the 2011 University of Washington Commencement Exercises on June 11.

These immersive works play between the boundaries of physical and virtual realms, creating new art experiences that are both technically and conceptually innovative.

This show presents the work of ten seniors and marks the completion of their Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees through the DXARTS program and the culmination of their artistic inquiry at the University of Washington.

Composer John Chowning is considered one of the pioneers of Computer Music. His contributions to this field, such as the invention of FM Digital Synthesis, had a strong cultural impact in the worlds of both classical and popular music. His invention allowed the production of one of the most popular digital synthesizers, the Yamaha DX7, which sold millions of units in the 1980s and was used by virtually every rock band from that era. Revenues from the licensing of this technology to Yamaha Corporation allowed Chowning to create the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, one of the most important Computer Music research centers in the world.

Chowning's most important contribution to the world of music, however, can be found in his compositions, all considered master pieces of Computer Music: Sabelithe (1971), Turenas (1972), Stria (1977), and Phoné (1981). Several of these pieces will be played during DXARTS' concert in Meany Hall over a state-of-the art surround sound system. The program will also include a more recent piece by Chowning, Voices (2005), for soprano and live electronics, performed by soprano Maureen Chowning.

John Chowning was born in Salem, New Jersey, in 1934. Following military service he studied music at Wittenberg University where he concentrated on composition and received his degree in 1959. He then studied composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger. In 1966 he received the doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he studied with Leland Smith.

With the help of Max Mathews of Bell Telephone Laboratories and David Poole of Stanford, in 1964 he set up a computer music program using the computer system of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This was the first implementation of an on-line computer music system ever.

Beginning in 1964 he began the research leading to the first generalized sound localization algorithm implemented in a quad format in 1966. In 1967, John Chowning discovered the frequency modulation (FM) algorithm in which both the carrier frequency and the modulating frequency are within the audio band. This breakthrough in the synthesis of timbres allowed a very simple yet elegant way of creating and controlling time-varying spectra. Over the next six years he worked toward turning this discovery into a system of musical importance. In 1973, he and Stanford University began a relationship with Yamaha in Japan, which led to the most successful synthesizer technology in the history of electronic musical instruments, known as FM synthesis.

John Chowning has received fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and was artist-in-residence with the Kunstlerprogramm des Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdiensts for the City of Berlin in 1974, and guest artist in IRCAM, Paris in 1978, in 1981, and in 1985. His compositions have been recorded on compact disc, WERGO 2012-50. In 1983 he was honored for his contributions to the field of computer music at the International Computer Music Conference in Rochester, New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988.

In 1992 he was given The Osgood Hooker Professorship of Fine Arts by the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. The French Ministry of Culture awarded him the Diplôme d'Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1995 and he was given the Doctorat Honoris Causa December 2002 by the Université de la Méditerranée. Chowning taught computer-sound synthesis and composition at Stanford University's Department of Music and was founder and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), one of the leading centers for computer music and related research.

Beginning in Autumn 2012 the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board will fund one year of research in affiliation with Seoul's prestigious Hongik University. During this period abroad, Rice will study the work of pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik, while creating a new series of inter-media artworks in preparation for his DXARTS dissertation project.

UK-based artists working in digital media were invited to submit work which celebrates innovative and creative use of new media technology. Each of the artists embraces technology in very different ways, from live networked installations through to moving image and sound. They have all exhibited internationally and are well respected within this field of work. Read more.

The School of Music and the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) present a special appearance by Europe’s leading percussion ensemble, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, as part of their 50th anniversary North American tour. The program will include Tempus ex Machina by Gérard Grisey and Persephassa, by Iannis Xenakis—two master pieces commissioned by the group that require the players to perform surrounding the audience. The program will also include a performance of On Space, a work for percussion sextet and 3D sound composed for the group by School of Music professor Juan Pampin.

Please Note: Due to the stage set-up for this concert, seating is extremely limited. Advanced ticket purchase is recommended.

PROGRAM NOTESTempus Ex Machina (1979) –– Gérard GriseyTempus Ex Machina is essentially a study of time. The pitch of the skins, woods and metals, extremely schematized and quickly detected by the ear, allow an acute concentration on the temporal structure. The piece is a blueprint from which color is reduced to the strictly necessary: only the form emerges, and the least error is fatal.

Like in most of my other works, the material is almost sublimated into a pure sound flux. Thus, the rhythms of the initial sequence are not to be taken as a cell, but rather as a vehicle of time: periodicity, acceleration and deceleration are only three poles between which the discourse oscillates, cutting a path between the similar and the different, towards the interior of sound.

This slow journey from the macrophony towards the microphony determines the form of Tempus Ex Machina, truly a time-dialation machine, in which the zoom effect lets us perceive the grain of sound, and therefore the sound matter in itself.

Thus, the last perceived sounds of the piece are the same strokes of
the Bass Drums and Log Drums from the beginning of the score, but
dilated in extreme, allowing us to capture the inaudible: transients,
partials, beatings… the body of sound.

After much meandering, we reached the end of the journey: the other side of the mirror.
–– Gérard Grisey

Persephassa (1969) - Iannis XenakisPersephassa is a piece for six percussionists composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1969. The piece was commissioned for the first-ever Shiraz Festival (organized by the Empress of Iran), held at the historic desert site of Persepolis. The title refers to the goddess Persephone, "the personification of telluric forces and of transmutations of life."

Persephassa gains much of its effect from having the six percussionists distributed around the audience. The treatment of space as a musical parameter is one of the most important preoccupations of Xenakis’ music, particularly in his works of the mid-to-late 1960’s. The dramatic impact of utilizing the performance space in this manner is evident in many passages throughout the piece in which accents or imitative rhythms are passed around the ensemble.

The percussionists use a wide range of instruments and sound effects during the piece, including sirens, maracas, and pebbles, along with an arsenal of drums, wood blocks, cymbals, and gongs.

On Space (2000/2005) –– Juan Pampin
"The pleasure of space: This cannot be put into words, it is unspoken. Approximately: it is a form of experience --the "presence of absence"; exhilarating differences between the plane and the cavern, between the street and your living-room; the symmetries and dissymmetries emphasizing the spatial properties of my body: right and left, up and down. Taken to its extreme, the pleasure of space leans toward the poetics of the unconscious, to the edge of madness."
--Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction

On Space was commissioned by the French percussion ensemble Les
Percussions de Strasbourg and GRAME (Centre National de Création Artistique), it was premiered on March 7, 2000, at the opening concert of the Musiques en Scène festival in Lyon, France. On Space closes Pampin's Percussion Cycle, a cycle of four pieces exploring the materiality of different percussion instrumental families; the other pieces of the cycle are Métal Hurlant (metal), Toco Madera (wood), and Skin Heads (skins). On Space uses sound materials created in those three works to shape space as continuous matter, capable of inflections and dramatic changes; both the sextet of performers and the electronic sources surround the audience supporting this purpose. The 3D sound system is used to locate sounds dynamically in space and to create a sound environment in which the audience is immersed. The electronic part of On Space acts also as a link between the different families of percussion instruments; the electronic sounds present spectral characteristics analogous to the instruments helping them blend or morph into each other over time. Divided in four continuous sections (named North, West, East and South), the form of On Space is freely modeled after Jorge Luis Borges' short story Death and the Compass. Some of the ideas behind the spatial design and layering of the piece could be traced back to concepts presented by Bernard Tschumi in his book Architecture and Disjunction.

A large revision of On Space (in particular of the West and South sections) was completed in 2005, right before the surround recording of the entire Percussion Cycle by Les Percussions de Strasbourg in January 2006.

COMPOSER BIO: Juan Pampin
Juan Pampin is Associate Professor of Composition at the School of Music of the University of Washington and Associate Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Pampin received an MA in Composition from Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Lyon, France and a DMA in Composition from Stanford University, where he studied with composer Jonathan Harvey. Juan Pampin’s music explores a territory outlined by the concepts of space, memory, and material; algorithmic composition and signal processing tools of his own development assist him in this artistic quest. His compositions, including works for instrumental, digital, and mixed media, have been performed around the world by world-class soloists and ensembles such as Melia Watras, Susana Kasakoff, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Arditti String Quartet, Sinfonia 21, and many others.

ARTIST BIO: Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Formed in 1962, Les Percussions de Strasbourg has earned a strong reputation over its 50- year history as a pioneering force for the creation and performance of new music. Since its foundation, the group has presented world premieres of more than 250 works, including pieces by emblematic modern composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Gérard Grisey. The group’s commitment to new compositions continues to inspire composers and audiences alike with a sense of urgency in the quest for innovative forms of musical expression. Les Percussions de Strasbourg reinvents the very form of the percussion recital in order to renew the spirit, discourse, and aesthetics of artistic performance.

EVENT
The University of Washington School of Music presents an evening of new works performed by internationally renowned visiting artists Garth Knox (France), Stefan Östersjö (Sweden), Nguyen Thanh Thuy, and Ho Hoai Anh (Vietnam). Works on the program include the premiere of a music-only version of Idioms, a piece of experimental musical theater combining experimental Western music and traditional Vietnamese music, created by School of Music composer Richard Karpen in dialogue with the musicians of the Six Tones (Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö and Vietnamese musicians Nguyen Thanh Thuy and Ho Hoai Anh) and programmer Josh Parmenter from the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. For the second half of the concert, Garth Knox joins the Six Tones, Karpen and Parmenter to perform collaboratively composed and improvised music for viola d'amore, dan trahn, dan bau, guitars, and live electronics.

NOTE: Violist Garth Knox also leads a free master class with students of Melia Watras, Friday, February 11, 1:30 p.m. in Brechemin Auditorium. Admission is free and open to the public.

PROGRAM DETAIL
Background on Idioms
Idioms is a piece of experimental music theatre with three actors and the three musicians in The Six Tones. The text in the piece is in English, Swedish and Vietnamese and can be understood as a deconstruction of three classic stories of impossible love across cultures and social barriers: Marguerite Duras: The Lover, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the Vietnamese tale of My Chau and Trong Thuy. The different traditions that the actors represent provide a range of expression in a wide span between spoken theatre and opera. The music, which in a similar way weaves traditional Vietnamese music together with experimental Western music, is produced by Richard Karpen in dialogue with the The Six Tones and Josh Parmenter from DXARTS.

The Sonat Series
SONAT is a series of experimental music-dramatic projects by Teatr Weimar and Ensemble Ars Nova. The point of departure is the form and aesthetics of the hörspiel transformed into scenic formation. The hörspiel has it’s strongest traditions in Germany and is the German term for radio drama. It is in other words one of the most recent dramatic and musical forms, directly linked to a technical achieve-ment that still today has an important role in our culture; the radio. The hörspiel brings together radio documentary, soundscape, acoustic and electroacoustic music with the semiotics of the theatre. Since 2008, we have cooperated in order to find new forms for experimental music theatre. The core of this activity is the production of new works, merging the aesthetics of the hörspiel with the theatre’s modes of expressions. So far, we have produced seven works, five of these were world premieres and two had their first Swedish performances. Our overarching ambition is to build an artistic competence and methodology for finding new forms of expressions for musical drama. An important part of this project is to create a European network of scenes for new and experimental musical drama.

Transitions
IDIOMS brings the collaboration between Teatr Weimar and Ars Nova in connection with Transitions, a project launched by Ensemble Ars Nova in 2006. Transitions wishes to enable contemporary art music to face the challenge of the multicultural society of today by means of creating meeting points where sound artists, composers and performers from any possible cultural background can come together in a context of mutual learning. Central issues to the project are aspects of cultural identity and heritage and how these can be kept alive and brought into creative use in the Western multicultural situation. An important figure of thought is how the transmission of a tradition always involves an element of transformation. One may say that it is this transformation that is in focus, in the artistic projects as well as in the research.

Working methods: Intercultural dialogue between traditional and experimental arts.
In the meeting between performance traditions of traditional Vietnamese Music and contemporary Western art music, the door is also opened to traditional Vietnamese Tuong drama. With the Western actors, also experimental modes of theatrical expression are added to the artistic framework. The project brings traditional cultures in dialogue with state of the art audio technology. The production of the electronics for the performances is done in collaboration with DXARTS at University of Washington.

Workshops with the musicians and actors
The fundamental building block of the artistic methodology is that of mutual learning. Also, the piece is to be developed jointly by all the participators, the composer and writer functioning as ’artistic directors’ of a process in which all performers can contribute material to the piece. This open process is intended to result in a piece that is built on the merging of different traditions of improvisation but eventually leading to a theatrical work which has a fixed identity and structure.

Introductory workshops
Two workshops in 2010 constitute a pilot project part of the production. The first sessions took place in Seattle in May 2010. In these sessions, only the musicians of The Six Tones met with Richard Karpen, the programmer Joshua Parmenter and writer Jörgen Dahlqvist. These sessions solidified the main ideas of how to develop the piece in a workshop format. The second series of sessions took place in October 2010 in Hanoi. The main objective with these sessions was to find an actor from the traditional Vietnamese theatre who might want to join the project and to continue developing the material in sessions also with the three musicians.

ARTIST BIOS:
Garth Knox, viola d’amore
Garth Knox was born in Ireland and grew up in Scotland. Being the youngest of four children who all played string instruments, he was encouraged to take up the viola, and he quickly decided to make this his career. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Fredrick Riddle, where he won several prizes for viola and for chamber music. Thereafter he played with most of the leading groups in London in a mixture of all repertoires, from baroque to contemporary music. In 1983 he was invited by Pierre Boulez to become a member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, where he had the chance to do much solo playing (including concertos directed by Pierre Boulez) and chamber music, touring widely and playing in international festivals.

In 1990 Garth Knox joined the Arditti String Quartet, playing in all the major concert halls of the world, working closely with and giving fi rst performances of pieces by most of today’s leading composers including Ligeti, Kurtag, Berio, Xenakis, Lachenmann, Cage, Feldman and Stockhausen (the famous «Helicopter Quartet»). Since leaving the quartet in 1998, Garth Knox has given premieres by Henze (the Viola Sonata is dedicated to him), Ligeti, Schnittke, Ferneyhough, James Dillon, George Benjamin and many others. He also collaborates regularly in theatre and dance projects and has written and performed shows for children and young audiences.

Improvisation is also an important part of his musical activity, and he has performed with George Lewis, Steve Lacy, Joel Léandre, Dominique Pifarély, Bruno Chevillon, Benat Achiary, Scanner and many others. He appears on the Frode Haltli CD Passing Images. In the past decade he has begun to write his own music, and is much in demand for theatre, dance and fi lm scores as well as concert pieces and instrumental works.

Garth Knox has recently begun to explore the possibilities of the viola d’’amore in new music, with and without electronics, and is in the process of creating a new repertoire for this instrument. His CD D’Amore (EMI New Series 1925) features old and new music for the viola d’amore.

Garth Knox now lives in Paris playing recitals, concertos and chamber music concerts all over Europe, the USA and Japan. His solo CD with works from Ligeti, Dusapin, Berio, Kurtág and others (MO 782082) won the coveted Deutsche Schallplaten Preis in Germany.

Nguyen Thanh Thuy, dan tranh
Nguyen Thanh Thuy studied at the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music where she received her diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Vietnamese Folklore in 2002. Since 2000 she holds a teaching position at the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. She has performed at the Roskildefestivalen in Denmark, Guzheng Melody in Indonesia, in Singapore, Ryssland, Kina and at numerous festivals in Vietnam. She has received many distinctions, in 1992 First Prize in the Contest of Traditional Instrument Performance on Television and Radio, Vietnam, as well as in 1998 First Prize and the Best Traditional Music Performer Prize in the National Competition of Zither Talents, 1998, Vietnam. Thuy has recorded several CD’s as soloist with orchestra: Nhung danh cam dan toc tre (Young musician Talents) – 1998, Giai dieu bon mua (Four Seasons’ Melodies) – 1998, Loi ru que huong (Lullaby of the Native Land) – 2001 and a solo CD: Doc tau dan tranh Nguyen Thanh Thuy Vol.1 (Solo dan tranh Nguyen Thanh Thuy Vol.1) – 2005

Ho Hoai Anh: dan bau
Ho Hoai Anh graduated from the University of Traditional Music at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in 2003. In 2009 he was awarded the Musician of the Year award – voted by community of Vietnamese Press. He also Performed in various countries around the world, along with orchestras in Europe, Japan, and Americ. In 2010, he was voted ‘Best Musician‘ by FM audiences.

Stefan Östersjö: ten-stringed guitar and ty bau
Stefan Östersjö is one of the most prominent soloists within new music in Sweden. Since his debut CD (Swedish Grammy in 1997) he has recorded extensively and toured Europe, the US and Asia. He writes articles on contemporary music and is frequently invited to give lectures and master classes at universities, festivals and academic conferences. His special fields of interest are the interaction with electronics, and experimental work with different kinds of stringed instruments other than the classical guitar. His great interest in chamber music has resulted in the founding of flute, viola and guitar-trio HOT 3 and collaboration with most chamber ensembles and important soloists in Scandinavia such as Jonny Axelsson, Geir Draugsvoll, KammarensembleN, Ensemble Gageego and Ensemble Ars Nova. He is continuously working with composers both in Sweden and abroad on the task of extending the repertory of solo works and chamber music with guitar. As a soloist he has cooperated with conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek, Peter Eötvös, Pierre André Valade, Mario Venzago, Franck Ollu and Tuomas Ollila. He has recorded extensively for the Swedish National Radio and also for Swedish TV as well as in many other countries.

Dr. Stefan Östersjö studied with Gunnar Spjuth and Prof Per-Olof Johnsson at the Malmö Academy of Music (1987-1992) and also with Peder Riis and Magnus Andersson in Stockholm and Darmstadt. He continued his studies with a PhD project within the field of artistic research, carried out in 2002-2008. His thesis SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY! Negotiating the Musical Work is published by Lund University. He is at present engaged in artistic research on improvisation in different cultural contexts at the Malmö Academy of Music.

In 1995 he made his CD debut as soloist on Ensemble Ars Nova's second CD (nominated to a Swedish "Grammy -96" for best classical album). - His first soloCD, with works by E Carter, J Dillon, F Donatoni and T Murail, recieved a Swedish "Grammy Award" in the category of "Best Classical Album" in 1998. - In summer -99 he recorded Kent Olofsson's "Il Liuto d'Orfeo", a recording which is released by GMEB in Bourges and by dB Productions (Sweden). - His second soloCD, Impossible Guitar Parts, with works by Swedish composers, was released in spring 2001 on dB Productions, Sweden - Portrait CD with the music of “Fredrik Ed”, soloist in ’Leash’, dB Productions, Malmö - He recorded the lute works of JS Bach on the 11-stringed alto guitar, released on dB Productions (Sweden) in 2003. - In 2003 “Trio con Forza”, a constellation of Swedish works for flute, viola and guitar, with HOT 3 was released on Phono Suecia. - His fourth solo CD on dB Productions, “Play Time” with works for guitar and electronics was released in 2004. - In 2005 “Rhizome”, a portrait CD with works for guitar and chamber ensemble by Swedish composer Christer Lindwall was released on Phono Suecia (Sweden). Portrait CD with the music of Johannes Johansson, recordings with HOT 3 and Ensemble Ars Nova), dB Productions, Malmö - His recording of Kent Olofsson’s Guitar Concerto “Corde” with the Gothenburg Symphony and Mario Venzago was released on Phono Suecia in 2008. - He has also recorded the complete guitar works by Danish composer Per Nørgård, released on Caprice records in autumn 2008.

Richard Karpen, composer
Richard Karpen (b. 1957) is one of the leading composers and researchers of electroacoustic music internationally. He is known not only for his pioneering compositions for live and electronic media, but also for developing computer applications for composition, live/interactive performance, and sound design.

Karpen is currently Director of the School of Music at the University of Washington after previously serving at the UW as Founding Director of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) and Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is also a Professor of Music Composition. He has been the recipient of many awards, grants and prizes including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Fellowships and grants for work outside of the U.S. include a Fulbright to Italy, a residency at IRCAM in France, and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the United Kingdom. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Karpen is a native of New York, where he studied composition with Charles Dodge and Gheorghe Costinescu.

Karpen's works are widely performed in the U.S. and internationally. While he is primarily known for his work in electronic media, Karpen has also composed symphonic and chamber works for a wide variety of ensembles. Furthermore, he has composed works for many leading international soloists such as soprano Judith Bettina, violist Garth Knox, trombonist Stuart Dempster, flutists Laura Chislett and Jos Zwaanenberg, guitarist, Stefan Östersjö, and oboist Alex Klein. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Karpen's compositions have been recorded on a variety of labels including Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, Le Chant du Monde, and DIFFUSION i MeDIA, and Capstone.

Joshua Parmenter, programmer
Joshua Parmenter is currently a research artist in Computer Music and Composition at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. He completed his D.M.A. in Composition at the University of Washington in 2005, where he studied with Prof. Richard Karpen. He received his Master of Music in Composition in 2002 from the University of Washington. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Edwin Dugger and Jorge Liderman. He is currently a Research Artist at the University of Washington at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media.
Parmenter's music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe. He specializes in both acoustic and electro-acoustic music, especially music that combines performers with real-time electronics. An important part of his research has been in the development of real-time synthesis software as part of the SuperCollider open source project. He also uses the CSound and Common Music synthesis programs. Currently, his research is focused on extending the real-time analysis and performance tools in the SuperCollider programming language, as well as a suite of Ambisonic Unit Generators for sound spatialization.
Parmenter's piece Organon Sostenuto for flute, bassoon, cello, double bass and live electronics was awarded the prize for outstanding composition from the Americas at ICMC 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008, he completed his "Musical Changes", a set of four pieces that explore crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando and ritardando The first piece "Cadence (III. Decrescendo) received its premiere in November 2005, and Concerto for Bass and Computer-realized Sound (II. Accelerando) was commissioned and performed in March, 2006 by bassist Kristjan Sigurleifsson.

UPCOMING EVENTS IN THIS SERIES:

MAY 25 (Wed)
UW Contemporary Group
Student ensembles, under the direction of Jonathan Pasternack, perform new music selections.

The composer collective Deep Listening Band—Seattle trombonist Stuart Dempster, keyboardist David Gamper, and accordionist Pauline Oliveros—elevates improvisational music with a passion (and reputation) for site-specific pieces that use space and resonance as inspiration. Celebrating more than 20 years together, the acclaimed group has honed its instrumental-electronic-experimental niche in a 2-million-gallon cistern, an old limestone quarry, and a lava cave. Now, after a weeklong residency absorbing Town Hall’s unique aural and tonal qualities, DLB presents a surround-sound concert featuring the premieres of Great Howl and Town Haul, enhanced by the Expanded Instrument System tonal “time machine” and state-of-the-art sound from the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Presented by the University of Washington School of Music, DXARTS, and Town Hall.

Since the establishment of the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (Ogaki, Japan), artists have been selected for the Residency Program by open application. Individuals chosen are those who actively produce experimental works that are nonconformist to genre frameworks and existing art. The artist's creative activities are supported for a six-month period at IAMAS. Students observe creations onsite, and through contact with talented artists they are able to learn about the practice of production.

By connecting with the culture and school environment of IAMAS, the artists also gain a great stimulation and combines this with his/her research and production. Many works created during artists' stays at IAMAS have also received international prizes. Thus far IAMAS has invited a total of 22 artists, including Toshio Iwai, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau and Luc-Courchesne.

Wan and Kang will be involved in a team project that will be exhibited at the Ogaki Biennale in September.

3,083 projects from 70 countries were submitted for prize consideration to the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica. The u19 – freestyle computing category tallied the most entries (657), followed by Digital Musics (615), Interactive Art (562) and Computer Animation (494). The 34 jurors took three and a half days to evaluate all submissions and to select this year’s prizewinners. The official awards ceremony will be part of the Ars Electronica Gala set for September 3, 2010 at an exciting new venue: a former production facility on the grounds of Linz’s Tobacco Factory.

The Prix Ars Electronica, initiated in 1987, has earned a reputation as the definitive barometer of trends in the international media art scene. Juries composed of leading experts in their respective fields convene annually to select the most outstanding contemporary works and to honor their creators with Golden Nicas, the “Oscars of media art.” Seven competition categories reflect the diversity of today’s media art: HYBRID ART, COMPUTER ANIMATION / FILM / VFX, INTERACTIVE ART, DIGITAL MUSICS, DIGITAL COMMUNITIES, [THE NEXT IDEA] voestalpine ART AND TECHNOLOGY GRANT, and the u19 – freestyle computing category for Austrian young people.

Heather S. Raikes, a PhD student in the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), has been selected as a finalist in the Nebraska Digital Workshop sponsored by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early-career scholars (pre-tenure faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students) in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased.
Ms. Raikes’ project is entitled Corpus Corvus: Exploring Contemporary Mythos through Immersive Media Poetics.

Four scholars were selected to present their work in digital humanities this year. Other finalists are:
• Amy Earhart, Texas A & M University, 19th Century Concord Digital Archive.
• Angel David Nieves, Hamilton College, The Soweto ’76 Archive.
• Matt Wilkens, Rice University, Revolutions and Large Text Corpora, or What is a Period?

Under the auspices of the CDRH faculty and staff, the Nebraska Digital Workshop endeavors to foster a network of digital scholars who will come together across disciplinary boundaries to advance humanities computing. For information about the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, see http://cdrh.unl.edu.

Among the award winners at the 47th Ann Arbor Film Festival was DXARTS senior Alexis Eggertsen. Ms. Eggertsen received the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist for "Cataract."

"Cataract" is described as a meditation on the the origins of behavior and of transformation in which the viewer is submerged in the silver sea of the psyche. The milky blindness of the visual cataract surges into a mythic foaming surf, a dormant birthplace for a new way of sensing and knowing. Facing departure and seeking metamorphosis, this film sensually dips its filmic toes into the synesthetic undertows of the unknown.

This short video first premiered at the Henry Art Gallery in May 2008.

The CARTAH book/CD project, A Zapotec Natural History, The University of Arizona Press, by Gene Hunn has won the Association of American Publishers 2008 PROSE Award in Book Subject Categories: Social Sciences - Archaeology & Anthropology.

Creative Capital, the national organization that supports individual artists, announces Assistant Professor James Coupe as one of the recipients of its 2009 grants. Initial awards of $10,000 have been made to 41 projects in emerging fields, innovative literature and performing arts. These projects represent 61 artists across the country working individually and in collaboration. Each project becomes eligible for additional funds of as much as $50,000 over the course of the organization’s multi-year commitment.

Coupe's project, Surveillance Suite, is a digital surveillance project and video that appropriates the identities of gallery visitors and staff into fictional narratives, over which the participants themselves have no control. Coupe is working with a team of screenwriters on short films that feature the gallery space and staff where Surveillance Suite is presented. He will then create software that recognizes visitors’ ages, genders, and ethnic characteristics, and then appropriates the visitors into the films themselves in real time. The videos that result will be played on monitors throughout the gallery.

The Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington in Seattle is seeking strong applications for its path-breaking PhD. program. DXARTS is an autonomous degree granting Center in the College of Arts and Sciences at the UW. The new PhD. program embraces an expansive range of digital and experimental arts practice and research across multiple disciplines. Faculty and students in DXARTS work both in established areas of experimental arts such as Digital Video, Physical Computing, Mechatronics, Computer Music and Sound Art, Computer Animation, Telematics, etc., as well as pursue innovative areas of arts research and creative context that have no media allegiance or historical precedent. Creative work underway in DXARTS draws from all combination of arts and sciences, and actively seeks the invention of completely new domains of arts practice.

The deadline for receipt of complete applications for the PhD. program is February 9th, for Fall 2009 admission. Though DXARTS highly encourages applications from all interdisciplinary fields of experimental arts practice, special attention will be focused this application cycle to artists whose backgrounds include interests and strong skill sets in, 3-D modeling and animation, spatial imaging, experimental video, computer music, computer programming, CNC machining, rapid prototyping, robotics and networked
environments. International students should apply as soon as possible due to the extra administrative time needed to process these applications.

Computer Aided Breathing wil premiere their brand new composition, Navigation, commissioned by Orgelpark and presented at the opening concert of 'Orgelpark Research: Improvisation Festival'. The piece is a 45-minute open-form composition centered around improvisation and composed specifically for the space of the Orgelpark and its many instruments. The score of the piece will be published by Orgelpark.

Computer Aided Breathing is a trio devoted to live improvisation, formed by Kirstin Gramlich (organ and keyboards), Stelios Manousakis (programming and live electronics) and Stephanie Pan (voice and sampler) in 2006. The singer and organist are used as live inputs for processing, which consist of a granular engine controlled manually and with the aid of stochastic functions and biology-inspired algorithms, such as L-systems, Cellular Automata and Genetic Algorithms. Their improvisations focus on mood, ambiance, texture and gesture. A fundamental aspect is that sonic elements flow from instrument to instrument and migrate from one perceptual quality to the other. The performers are considered to be part of one sonic environment, playing the same collective instrument. There are no solos; everyone is allowed to introduce a new element or elaborate on an existing one. The trio made their first cd release, Fukuoka Method, on SevenInchRecordings in March 2007.

"The Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair is the University of Washington's most prestigious appointment in the Arts. When Mr. Jones set up the Chair, he stipulated that it should rotate between all the Arts units. The first holder of the Jones Chair, Professor Thomas Lynch of the School of Drama, is an internationally famous stage designer whose work has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Seattle Opera, and other major theaters in America and abroad.

Succeeding Professor Lynch, the new holder of the Jones Chair is Professor Shawn Brixey, Director of our pathbreaking program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) and an internationally prominent visual artist whose exhibitions and commissions have appeared at Documenta, The Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Karlsruhe, The Cranbrook Art Museum, The MIT Museum, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, The Chicago Art Institute, The 1998 Winter Olympics, The first American Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, The Henry Art Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Shawn Brixey creates stunning experimental art environments and interactive electronic installations that are inspired and enabled by the extraordinary developments taking place on the frontiers of contemporary physics, materials science, and electrical engineering. As such, his work epitomizes all the reasons why the arts belong center stage at a top-flight research university such as the University of Washington. Like all great art, Shawn's work allows us to see worlds we have never seen before, and that would not exist without the artist's creative reshaping of the natural phenomena that surround us. In this respect, Professor Brixey's highly contemporary art participates in an artistic tradition that reaches back to the Italian Renaissance, by using technology to render visible the otherwise invisible beauty of the natural world."

Tre Marie is an improvised interactive audio-visual dance performance. The system in progress is an innovation of RF-ID (radio-frequency identification) technology for dance performance, which allows performers to improvise live visuals on stage. The performance is a reconstructed architecture of spaces and encodes the spatial aesthetics of the interaction between human, theatrical space and cinematic space. Tre Marie is a collaboration between Annie On Ni Wan, Hiroki Nishino & Pamela Pietro. Tre Marie premiered at a DXARTS Fall concert and was performed at the ACM Conference 2006, UCSB, Santa Barbara.

ASIAGRAPH is an organization that involves cooperation between people, government, corporations and universities in Asia, as well as an exhibition event for the purpose of reaching a more prosperous human life by elements from Asian culture together with IT technology.